Space Diablo

Last night was a good night.  It was a fairly crappy day at work because we were still dealing with the ramifications of events that happened over the break.  Nothing says excitement like an 8 am conference call.  That said I had an amazing bowl of chicken noodle soup waiting on me when I got home.  Sunday during the day we made a batch of soup in the crock pot, and for whatever reason soup is all the more amazing on day two.  This time around I added a little shredded cheese to it and it was insanely good and the perfect thing to at least in part make me forget the day that lead up to it.  As far as my evening the bulk of it was spent hanging out with Grace and Mor in Destiny.  While I consider myself still very much a fledgling player, they are more so… and as a result it was kinda fun just to ride along as Mor experienced all of the content for the very first time.  The big take away from the night however is that the year one strike bosses are still insane bullet sponges.  I kinda find it sad that they never went back and updates these strikes, when much better year two versions exist.  The walker in the Devil’s Lair normal difficulty strike… is quite possibly the hardest strike boss ever… or at the very least the one that takes the most time to bring down.  I solo walkers out in the patrol zones for fun…  and this one just would not die.

Mor calls the game “Space Diablo” and it is fitting because really in the end we are all after tasty loot.  Since I had already done most of this content before a bunch of times, I opted to play my Warlock which is generally my least progressed character.  On the Stormcaller spec for example I only had the base abilities unlocked that you exit the mission with.   By the end of the night however I had a significant amount unlocked, and gear wise my Warlock has suddenly pulled out ahead of my Hunter.  The thing with Warlock is that I like literally everything about it… except the jump.  Squirrel will probably fight me on this one, but it just feels wrong.  It doesn’t work the way I want it to work… and in truth if I could just give my Warlock the Titan jump… everything would be peachy.  Then again I would give literally every class the Titan jump, and part of me hopes that they introduce a second round of artifacts that do just this… allow you to customize each character by giving them a different class jump.  I don’t think that is likely ever going to happen, so in the meantime I will have to console myself with having permatracking thanks to Memory of Gheleon on every character.  If nothing else that artifact is amazing for finding chests… which considering just how many there are in the plaguelands greatly increase how much glimmer I am getting.

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Once things wound down in Destiny, I disappeared downstairs and worked on my Deathknight for awhile.  Sunday with the start and stop nature of work, I didn’t get terribly far in knocking out some of my dungeon quests.  In fact there was a point where I had queued for a dungeon, and shortly after the second boss had to drop group to hop on a work conference call.  Were it a guild group this probably would not have been a show stopper given that I could alt tab back and forth as needed, however I excused myself from the PUG and became resigned to not actually finishing up Stormheim.  So last night I started off by running Halls of Valor, which went extremely quickly and allowed me to move on in good conscience to Highmountain.  Right now I am largely just focusing on the main story of the zone and ignoring any offshoots for the moment, because it already seems like I am going to ding 110 well before wrapping everything up.  At the moment I am sitting at 60% into 108, and have just started the quests in High Mountain meaning I have most of an entire zone to level through.  I will absolutely ding before leaving this zone, and then I can begin the slow process of gearing through World Quests.  I have to say that I love Frost Deathknight for both a leveling and dungeon running spec, and it is going to dethrone my Paladin as my primary alt.

All of this said… I am not likely to work on my Deathknight tonight because I have a date with Final Fantasy.  I am too old to stay up and play at the official launch of a game but instead have it sitting waiting for me on my PS4 for when I get home.

The Devil’s Lair

Bad Decisions

VisualBoyAdvanceM 2014-06-16 06-08-24-229 I am still feeling pretty lousy from this allergy induced stupor, so last night I just was not really feeling Wildstar and interacting with other human beings.  I ended up logging out about 9:30 and attempting to lay down.  I hung out in bed for awhile snuggling with our cats but sleep just refused to take me.  So as a result I ended up getting back up and decided I would begin my four job fiesta run.  My intent was just to go through the process of backing up my savegame files from the previous draft run we were doing, and simply start the game going… maybe get to the first crystal.  Next thing I know it is midnight and I am moments away from getting the fire crystal.

Now however I am paying the price because I feel nice and groggy to add to my allergy induced stupor.  It is funny how a game you have played so many times can be so enthralling.  So far I am off to a pretty good start.  My first job was the Knight which lead to a really easy start to the game and me just being able to roll over the top of almost every encounter thanks to the power of “Two Handed”.  The second pick from Gilgobot was the Red Mage, which still worked okay since I did not have either the black or white mage in the first round.  Also the Red Mage can totally use a Two-Hander if equipped with that ability, so still pretty much rolling over the top of everything without having to cast any magic at all.

Since I am just a little ways from getting the fire crystal I went ahead and requested my fire job.  Now is when things start to fall apart.  I wound up with the Geomancer, which is one of my least favorite classes.  This means I do have a use for bells…  but I’ve always felt the geomancer was somewhat of a useless pick.  Basically I have a couple of options… I can either deal with it and struggle through or I can donate money to Four Job Fiesta to buy my way out of geomancer hell.  I have yet to decide what to do, and ultimately this is why I chose to request my job a little early so I could mull it over.  Basically I have to make a decision before I collect the fire job crystals with which way I am going to go.  I would have far rather had ninja or ranger, but then again I would have rather had mystic knight than red mage. but more than happy to roll with the punches there.

Destiny Group Play

Destiny First Look Alpha_20140615142316  Yesterday afternoon after I had finished editing the podcast and writing my morning blog post that almost turned into an afternoon one, I opted to do some Destiny with Tamrielo and Ashgar.  At this point Tam and I were both completely sold on the game, but Ash however was not really feeling the game.  While I was finishing up my blog post, Ash and tam ran through the first mission in good time and the three of us entered the “Explore Cosmodrome” map point which was a free roaming version of the Old Russia area you visit in the first static mission.  We wandered around out there for some time getting both Tam and I to level 7 and Ashgar to level 6.  The mobs we encountered ranged from level 2 near the entrance to the area, to level 4 in the instanced areas… and finally level 8 or 9 deep in the zone.

I had the forethought to set this up and stream while we ran around.  The interesting thing about the playstation party communication is that apparently it ONLY records my voice.  This leads for some odd one sided conversation going on as you watch the video.  After having a blast running around in a free form area, we decided to take it to the next level and do what is in essence  their first dungeon set in the same basic area.  I have to say the concept works… like the boss fights in Borderlands 2 were interesting, but they never really reminded me of the level of complexity found in an MMO boss fight.  Destiny seems to bridge that gap and provided us with a number of extremely challenging encounters.  The first one was a sort of “hold this spot” fight where we were flooded with really horrible things in the room with us.

The Devil’s Lair

Destiny First Look Alpha_20140615152929 The first encounter essentially involved setting off one of our ghosts to work on scanning an objective, while it does this we have to hold the position.  During this time we encountered a brand new mob type that we had not seen to that point called a “Stealth Vandal”.  These are the sniper type mobs but they spawn in stealthed and remain so until they actually strike.  Now their form of stealth is not truly hidden, but they blend in with the background “predator” like.  It took us several tries to get a feel for how the encounter worked and manage to place each of us strategically around the room.  Even after doing so it still involved a lot of running around chaotically looking for a safe bit of cover to attack from.  Every so often one of us would have to stay alive long enough for another one to spawn back in.  This becomes a crucial skill since when the last player dies… the entire team respawns back at the checkpoint and you have to redo the encounter from the start.

Destiny First Look Alpha_20140615155733 The second encounter was the one we had been waiting for.  Periodically when in the open world version of the zone these group encounters spawn in.  One of them is this insane walking tank that has a blast attack that you simply cannot hide from effectively.  If you are on the other side of the wall when it goes off, it will still very much one shot you.  The idea behind the encounter is that you have to take out a piece of leg armor, which causes it to fall down temporarily and expose a weak point behind the red cockpit looking shell.  You can only whittle down so much health during each one of these phases.  So the biggest problem we ran into during the fight is that we simply ran out of ammunition.  Every so often another drop ship lands, and periodically it spawns the little drones… all of which are decent sources of ammunition.  But this also forces one to make a suicidal run dangerously close to the walking tank to be able to gather it up effectively.

Destiny First Look Alpha_20140615155846 I wish I had thought to fire up the stream before going into the mission, because I swear we were fighting the tank for a good thirty minutes.  Once we got to the other side of it, things started to get super creepy.  You walk through an area littered with hundreds and hundreds of bones strewn everywhere.  I started to wonder if I accidentally teleported into a Doom game, but I have to say I am loving the atmosphere so far.  I really have no clue what exactly the “Fallen” are yet, but they seem to be some sort of incectoid baddies similar to the Prothean/Collectors from Mass Effect.  Honestly there can be parallels made between those two games in many ways, as the atmosphere often feels like you would imagine Mass Effect would feel if the Reapers came and decimated the planet.  So far I am hooked, and looking forward to getting to play more of it.  Right now we have managed to hit the cap allowed in this first alpha test, which sucks a bit because each of us have gear that will never be equippable as we cannot get higher than level 8.  That said it was a really good time, and I hope to play some of the other classes to see if I like them better.

Wildstar

My plan is tonight to play Wildstar, and work on finishing Auroria on my Engineer.  Right now I have reached a point where I am just tired of that zone and want to move on.  The southern area of the zone is extremely nasty, and I feel like I am almost underleveled to be able to complete it successfully.  I am wondering if I need to go back and finish some of the challenges that I didn’t quite make to see if I can finish off 22.  I am also considering making myself a secondary hotbar setup with non-tanky abilities to see how much more smoothly questing goes.  Right now my biggest problem is that it takes forever for me to kill anything, and while I can stay alive for a really long time… that time is not infinite.  I feel like I am high center right now on my engineer, so I need to do something to get back into the swing of playing it.

#Destiny #DevilsLair #FourJobFiesta #FinalFantasyV