This morning should be the beginning of a return to normality for me. The flood related stuff seems to have wrapped up for me and with it my weird alternating work schedule. I still feel somewhat jet lagged from the experience of having to rapidly shift around my schedule for a week and some change. I am sure as I return to my normal rhythm of getting up at 5:30 each morning and going to bed around 10-ish each night those effects will fade. Last night did not help since it was both the return of Fear the Walking Dead and a documentary series on a local murder mystery and we wanted to watch both.
This weekend also signaled the return of the “flowerbabies” in our back yard, as well as the return to having to add another step to my morning routine of watering them. We are getting a really late start to the season in part because our nursery of choice was flooded. We went by on Memorial Day but they seemed to be cleaning up and not actually open for business. Saturday however they were ready to go and we picked up a number of hanging baskets to go on the hooks that we set out around the pool. You never quite know what you are going to get until you go and then sorta pick out whatever happened to speak to you at the time. I am quite partial to the Purslane because those orange and magenta combination is stunning. Also a big fan of the white petunias with the eggplant centers. We have a mix of colors but they now need tending so I will have to start cutting my blog time a little short each morning.
As far as gaming goes I spent the vast majority of my weekend running bounties. I’ve reached the point where I can easily survive Torment XVI so I am now chaining my way through objectives. I finally realize how Grace always seems to know exactly where she is going in these levels, and I feel like once I have reached my final objective… I will have most of the semi-random map layouts nailed as well. At the very least I will hopefully stop going the opposite way given that for the most part the areas around the warp pads are somewhat static. This is not something that I had caught onto in all of my hundreds of hours playing this game. I am sometimes pretty dense.
At this point I have gathered up 25 bounty caches. The majority of these are from Torment 15 with some of the more recent additions to my pile from Torment 16. The caches apparently have a memory for what level you were on when you got the cache even though I can’t seem to see any external indicator of this. Ultimately I am working on knocking out the Conquest of Avarice which is to loot 50 million gold in a streak. Since I don’t want to have to do this insane amount of farming twice… I am probably going to significantly overshoot my target but i am loosely following this guide I found on the forums.
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.
So in theory right now if I figure everything I have looted at this point is a T15 even though I know some are not… it would get me to 38 million gold. I think my goal is going to be to farm up about a page and a half of caches in my vault and then do the mass open. Basically I don’t want to have to do this grind twice so I figure well overshooting my target is the best course of action. 52 caches would be roughly a page and a half and that should in theory net a minimum of 80 million gold… so MORE than enough to hit my target.
It was probably nonsense for me to pick this one as my first conquest… but in doing so it has given me a sense of purpose to grind out an incompatible number of items that have ultimately bolstered my ability to take down content. While I have only picked up a couple of primal ancients… they have seemingly made a difference. The weird thing about this season is that I have yet to see a single Ramaladni’s Gift. I have an ancient Pigsticker waiting in the bank for me to get one since I don’t want to have to re-roll to get a socket… although I guess I could just re-roll one of the stats that I would have re-rolled anyways and roll to something other than the socket when I finally find one.
Whatever the case… I am super into Diablo 3 this season and have been more driven to solo grind than I think I ever have. This somehow transitioned from a social game experience for me… to something that I am finding even more deeply relaxing than it previously was.