demon hunter Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Last Season

March 1, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! I am going to warn you that this post is going to be a bit on the melancholy side. Yesterday over lunch I finished up Diablo III Season 28 or at least finished the Guardian step in the journey. There is still a ton that I have left to unlock on the Altar of Sacrifice, but I largely plan on doing that at my leisure over the coming months. While this was not the easiest season ever, it was definitely on the easier scale. Ace finished their season I believe on Sunday, so I was lagging a bit behind. My goal is to help Thalen and maybe Byx if she wants it… finish up their seasons and largely chill out doing low-key content for awhile. I feel like I have three pretty powerful builds on the Demon Hunter having crafted the Gears of Dreadlands Haedrigs set, the Unhallowed Essence Multishot set, and then a Marauder set yesterday for the purpose of the set dungeon.

Shocking to no one who has been with me for very long in my Diablo journey, saved the set dungeon for the very last thing. It always feels really weird to have completed almost all of the harder achievements with this relatively simple one sitting there holding up the process. I hate set dungeons because I have a mental block about being timed while being expected to accomplish a certain set of tasks. This is deeply rooted in my brain and dates back to some third-grade trauma. While I fully understand WHY it exists, I have never truly been able to remove it entirely. I always make the set dungeon out to be this epic obstacle, then like yesterday end up one-shotting the damned thing. I specifically built a Marauder set because, for a Demon Hunter, it is probably the easiest option especially now that the damned worms are marked with a skull on the map.

While this was an enjoyable season… there is just something about it that feels hollow. I think it dawned on me WHY it feels weird. The entire community is treating this like this is the end of Diablo III. Raxxanterax for example has been a pillar of the content creation community, and yesterday announced that the video for Challenge Rift 297 would be the very last of those guides that he released. Even between Ace and I, we largely wanted to make sure that we were going to finish this season because we thought that with the impending release of Diablo IV, this might be the last opportunity to rekindle the old fun. It seems like everyone seems to have that same idea and I am seeing folks returning from the Path of Exile community that had not played the game in years. This feels like a send-off for a beloved friend, but also… is exceptionally depressing.

Diablo III has meant so much to me on a deeply personal level. Sure I have always loved Diablo since I first got into testing for the original game back in college. Diablo III however set the pace of a reoccurring destination event surrounding its seasons. Ace and I would do this late-night leveling thing on Friday they released, and while we’ve made less progress over the years as we have gotten more used to sleep… it was still this thing I think we both looked forward to. It felt like an MMORPG launch happening every three or four months like clockwork, and no matter what else we were playing it would bring a handful of us together for this destination event. While the magic also lasted a shorter period of time as we got better at the time, often finishing the season before the end of the first season… it was still something that I set my calendars by and made sure I was ready to go without distractions.

I think part of the struggle we’ve gone through over the last few years is that Diablo was severely tainted by the events surrounding the shitstorm that is Blizzard Entertainment. We’ve struggled at length to find another game that triggered the same sort of mental joy that Diablo III Season Journey did, and have failed. While I love Path of Exile as the ugly child that it is, it really feels bad to play with friends. We’ve tried Wolcen, Torchlight III, Torchlight Infinite, and hell even some Grim Dawn and none of them have managed to rekindle the magic surrounding our quarterly destination event. It is my hope that maybe just maybe Last Epoch releasing its multiplayer update on the 9th of March will give us the first real viable option. I’ve played enough of it to know that I enjoy it quite a bit, but it is really going to take us all playing it together to determine if it feels “right”.

Due to some lucky circumstances… I got gifted a copy of Diablo IV so I will be poking my head into it when it releases and the upcoming beta periods. However I have enough friends that are simply not willing to give Blizzard any more money, so I figure it is going to be a pretty hollow experience. I am also not entirely certain that it would capture the magic of Diablo III. When the third game was released, there were large parts of the broader Diablo community that hated it. Diablo IV feels very much like a play to bring them back into the fold and maybe make a dent in the popularity of Path of Exile. That means it is very unlikely to be the big dumb fun that a Diablo III season is, and will be more focused on a more grimdark hardcore audience. Diablo Immortal was probably the true spiritual successor, but given that it wound up being a shit sandwich of truly evil monetizations… that one is off the table.

I guess even if Diablo III fades away, I have all of the memories of me and Ace doing dumb things together for fun and profit. This is one of the oldest images I found on WordPress of us doing a greater rift together. I’m hoping that Last Epoch can become the next game that we shift our quarterly nonsense to. Path of Exile worked great for me, but never really became a good-feeling group activity. Last Epoch is going to be starting their seasons I believe around the launch of 1.0 and calling them “Cycles”. It sounds like at least with the start they are going to be relatively simplistic outings without a lot of extra mechanics going on. I think I am mostly okay with that because there is a thin line between doing next to nothing with early Diablo III seasons, and the wild feature bloat that is Path of Exile leagues.

Basically, I feel like a good friend is moving away, and that there isn’t much I can do about that. I fully expect when Diablo IV launches that what community existed around Diablo III will slowly fade away. So in many ways, this probably legitimately is the “Last Season” and I am going to try and be okay with that.

Double Agent

January 3, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve reached this sorta happy place with World of Warcraft where I find myself alternating back and forth between it and Destiny 2 for how I spend most of my evenings. Over the last month or so I had spent most of my pushing up my Orc Warrioress, and have now reached the point where I can no longer easily push her power level up by just doing World Quests. As a result this caused a bit of an identity crisis over the Christmas break and lead me to pick another of my various horde characters to start working on. Having not actually pushed up a Demon Hunter… and Legion being the expansion all about Illidari… I figured it was high time to actually do this thing. I started out leveling as Havoc like I had before on the Alliance side but promptly swapped over to Vengeance when I started missing tank survival. It turns out that I really like Vengeance as a spec and you get to do a bunch of fun things… sadly at the cost of your charge around the map ability. The way shorter cooldown version of Heroic Leap in the form of Infernal Strike however makes up for the lack of the less predictable movement ability. If nothing else the build allows me to do most of the World Questing with impunity and at some point I will actually try some dungeon tanking.

For the moment however when it comes to LFR, Heroics or Timewalking… I have been swapping back to Havoc and just noobing it up. This is the point where I have to step back from some of the commentary I made while leveling the warrior. I was shocked and amazed at how chill the horde side of the house had been during my experiences… but once I donned the mantle of the demon hunter… and potentially as a side effect of the long holiday break… all of the asshats seemed to come out of the woodwork. Monday night I chain ran my five timewalking dungeons in a row… and all of the cool demeanor that I had originally attributed to the horde side melted away. It became a night of gripes and wipes as I limped through my five instances and then walked away praising some dark god that my sanity was still intact. I am still not entirely certain why my recent change in religion of sorts and swap to the horde, but I would have to think a lot of it has to do with simply wanting to hang out with my friends in Facepull. As a result it has been this super chill place to hang out and have occasional comments about the game and life in general. On a day by day basis I am feeling way less of a double agent and more leaning towards the Horde. For years I never could seem to get into characters on that side of the fence and the only reason why I had a max level character during Warlords was because I boosted, this time around however I have the same number of Alliance characters as I do Horde and I am already plotting the next thing to level. Side note… Blood Elf demon hunters look way cooler than the damned floppy eared Night Elf equivalent.

Bumbling Around

August 11, 2016 by Belghast

Yeti Power

After a Tuesday night spent chasing Legion Invasions and being an Illidari, I felt like last night I needed a nice relaxing night of being a completely different sort of Demon Hunter. By nice and relaxing I mean a night spent pushing rifts and causing anime style rocket explosions as I cleared entire rooms at the same time. It is strange how Diablo has morphed over the years for me. Originally it was that game that I wished I could play with friends… but didn’t have stable enough internet to be able to play it. Then it when the second game was released it absolutely become a game I played almost exclusively with friends. When three was released, I was in a place where I was largely soloing and found it a less than amazing experience. Now several years later each time a new season is launched it becomes this focusing force that brings a bunch of us back together for another trip happily through the paragon and gear grind. For most of the night last night I was joined by my fairly regular demon slaying buddy Grace, and we also managed to snag Thalen and bring him along for the fun. The night as a whole was pretty great because on our first tag team attempt at bounties… a Menagerist Goblin spawned dropping this extremely awesome Yeti pet named “The Bumble” for me to go wandering with. Additionally I was able to knock out several pieces of gear off of my list, and I finally managed to get the last of the three legendary gems needed for this build. The highlight of the night however was getting an Ancient Yang’s Recurve to drop… which admittedly made Grace super jealous. However because of this it is now my duty to tag along in any D3 madness to push hard for folks so they too can get their sweet ancient drops.

The other thing that happened last night is that I attempted the “Numlock Trick”. One of the more annoying things in Diablo 3 is that most builds have some sort of buff that they want to cast essentially anytime it is available. The goal of the build is usually to get enough cooldown reduction so that you can keep it up 100% of the time. For the Multishot build I am using for my Demon Hunter, it is focused largely around getting keeping Vengeance up 100% of the time… and right now I have it close enough that I maybe have a second without it up at any given time. The other day I heard something mentioned in a build video talking about “using the numlock trick” on one of these buffs… and I had to investigate to satiate my curiosity. There is apparently a strange glitch in the game that allows you to essentially constantly be spamming a button press. I mean in theory you could do the same thing with hardware macros on a keyboard, but this just sort of “works”. The idea is to bind the 1-4 hotkeys to have a secondary key which relates to Numpad 1-4. To toggle on autocast for any of the abilities you turn your Numlock key on, hold down the keys you want to autocast and then turn off your Numlock. Just like that the key keeps repeating over and over… which causes some weird behavior. Firstly if you are holding any key the cast will not fire… so if you are holding force move or the left mouse button down… just ease up on it to let the next cast go off. Secondly… it has the strange behavior of interrupt abilities like identification or teleport. What I do to get past those is to start the channeled cast, and then hold any key. In my binding I have S set as an alternate bind for Shift… which is to stop moving and hold still. Holding this down while channeling works well to keep my auto casts from interrupting whatever ability I want to do.

The other “strangeness” that happens is that any time you shift games, and sometimes when you just downgrade difficulty it can turn the autocasting off completely. In this case you just flip back on numlock, hold your keys down, and turn it back off to set the glitch back up. Now that I know this exists… I am wondering what other uses can be had for it. Supposedly folks use this regularly for Taeguk builds on the monk side to keep the stacks. In theory I could do the same trick to make sure I am evasive fire shots in with my hunter, to build hatred and keep up the damage shield. For the time being however I am keeping it simple and only using this to try and keep Vengeance up as often as possible as well as my Companion ability. I was always horrible at using these cooldowns, and tended to save them until I reached a point where I had a lot of elites to attack rather than just constantly using them knowing that I had another cooldown just around the corner. I need to spend some time working on achievements so I can catch up to the point Grace is currently in the seasonal journey. I am still not sure if I am going to go for the stash slot this time around… but for the moment I am going to keep playing so long as the game feels fun and fresh. Tonight however I have earmarked to go do Broken Shores scenario on my various alts… because I have yet to actually see the new cinematics.

We Are Prepared

August 10, 2016 by Belghast

Unplanned Plans

Last night did not go as I actually thought it would. Yesterday was the patch that allowed folks like me who purchased the digital pre-order of Legion to roll Demon Hunters. Firstly I want to take a step back and acknowledge just how damned brilliant this idea is. Sure there were demon hunters everywhere yesterday, but the total number running through the intro quests felt reasonable. I realize they have gotten much better at instancing since the days of the Death Knight and Wrath of the Lich King… but still it seems rather smart to forcibly split up the population into waves. There are still lots of folks who prefer to do physical copies of games, especially one with a long tradition of having awesome physical copies. I guess the hope is that by letting some folks into the content early, that will mean that there won’t be quite the launch day crush on this single zone. Now stepping forward again, I had planned on playing a completely different Demon Hunter last night… as I continued working on my seasonal character in Diablo 3. This was largely due to the fact that I fully expected the servers to be burning down around me, and the game to be essentially in an unplayable state with Demon Hunters, Broken Shore and the Legion Zone Invasions all starting last night. I got home relatively early, and while waiting on pizza to arrive I thought I would pop in and at least create a character. For whatever reason when I boosted the Mage I just picked a name from the stable of names I have used in other games. Even though it made zero sense… I named said mage Belglaive… a name that would later be ideal for my Demon Hunter. As a result I also did a little renaming yesterday to shift my Mage to be Belglacial since I highly favor frost spec… which freed up the name for my demonic Night Elf. The other name in the running of course was the one I used on the beta server “Belblight”.

What happened in reality is that both myself and Grace spent the rest of the night playing World of Warcraft and participating in the zone invasions. I casually quested my way through the Demon Hunter starter content while eating dinner and then after getting dumped into Stormwind I was given the quest to do a Legion event. For those who have not done them yet, it seems like Blizzard has learned a lot from the past events. The ones that stick out in my mind the most is the Undead Invasion event that happened just ahead of the launch of the original Naxxramas and the release of Wrath of the Lich King. In those events items spawned in a handful of zones, and it was a mad dash for players to scramble over to the area to get enough completion on it to be able to qualify for loot. I ground these hard enough to get a set of gear for pretty much all of the armor types… sadly the leather set is stranded forever on another battle.net account but I still regularly wear the plate set that largely looks like a blue and brown judgement recolor. The problem with the event however was the fact that you were in constant competition with other players for spawns, and that it also caused you to camp zones until you got everything you needed. I spent so many hours out in Azshara… the good version not the one the version the Goblins later wrecked.

Maybe Space Goats Weren’t Unreasonable

What happens in the Legion Invasion event however is that at any given time there will be two “hot zones” in the world where invasions are happening. When I started playing last night those were Tanaris around Gadgetzan and Northern Barrens around The Crossroads. The part that I did not quite catch onto however is that each character can complete both of the active zones, and does not need to wait for the event to “start”. What happens instead is the moment you cross the zone boundary, you are stuck in an instanced version that is currently in phase one of the event. It seems as though all you really need to do is to be in zone as each of the phases shifts, and I am uncertain how much actual participation you need to do. There have been many times I was still flying to my destination when the event transitioned into Phase 2 and I have still managed to get full credit every time. Upon completing Phase Two you receive a Small Legion Chest and upon completing the Final Phase you receive a Large Legion Chest. From each of these a handful of things can drop, but the bulk are item level 700 weapons and armor, as well as some of the currency of the event Nethershards. It also seems like any time you take one of the “bosses” of the event that spawn and are marked with a Skull, you receive somewhere between 5 and 10 Nethershards per kill. In theory if you are wanting to maximize your earning, you would probably want to roll around as a team and focus entirely on killing the skulls as soon as they spawn. The only problem there is that they have mechanics… one of which was an version of old school Kazzak that essentially becomes invulnerable when he kills ten players. All of these Shards can be turned in for goodies including a Pet, full appearance sets, and individual weapons at the Captive Wyrmtongue <Reluctant ‘Quartermaster’> that can be found in Stormwind, Orgrimmar and occasionally out in the field as well. I know for example he spawns in Tanaris near Gadgetzan during that invasion.

Now quite possibly the coolest part of this event is that it appears to be level agnostic. To test this theory Grace grabbed her level sixty mage and brought it over to Tanaris where she was able to complete the event, with every mob appearing to her as though it were around her level range. When she opened the chests instead of rewarding item level 700 gear, it gave her gear appropriate for her level. That means players who are not even at the current level cap are going to be able to participate in this invasion, unlike the pre-launch events in the past. The best part is that it seemed to “just work” and if this is an example of how well their new tech works to auto level players to the content… I am pretty impressed. I know all of the zones in Legion function in this manner, and that you can start in pretty much any place while leveling through and complete the content in your own order. It is my ultimate hope that maybe just maybe this tech eventually trickles down to the older zones. Now the possible negative here is that I still love being able to solo raid content… so the hope is that maybe they can come up with some version of the “unsynched” style of play that we can do in Final Fantasy XIV. In any case it was a fun night of swapping alts and then flying across great stretches of the contents trying to reach where the legion invasions were happening. The two “hot zones” swap out every four hours, and largely right now I am looking at them as a good way of playing catch up on the gear for my characters. Only one of my characters is in the 700s item level wise, so pretty much everything I pick up from this event is an upgrade. Right now I am largely focused on getting the Warlock and the Demon Hunter geared out… because I have this feeling that they are rapidly going to become my alts of choice.