Diablo Franchise Archives - Page 38 of 55

Prone to Rant

April 9, 2019 by Belghast

I love it when a game makes me seem like a whiny madman. I regularly read reddit, but very rarely comment about anything. However my frustration levels with Anthem have been growing to the point where I occasionally want to vent. I mean I try my best to keep this blog fairly positive, or at least balanced… but the Anthem reddit has been a salt mine since release so I figured it was a safe place to vent my frustrations. After today’s patch still announced no relief to the loot woes… I wound up venting at the nearest thread basically stating that apparently Bioware considers the current state of the game to be working as intended. To which I threw this lengthy comment.

So they have stated that loot isn’t where they want it to be. However it has been 52 days since the launch of the game and there has been a constant drumbeat from the player base that “loot is broken”. They have “accidentally” fixed loot twice to much praise from the players, so I find it hard to believe they do not understand which levers need to be pulled to give us what we actually want.

What I do believe however is they do not understand the kind of game that they built. They seemingly created Destiny with Flight… but with the loot system from Diablo 3 without fully understanding what makes either game tick. In Destiny… Exotics are these rare drops that feel super special when one happens, but that only works because every Exotic Weapon that you get is a curated roll and in the case of the armor that has some variation you have a way of re-rolling the stats. Diablo 3 on the other hand has a lot of variation in the loot and with that a bunch of crap items that are immediately going to get sharded… but the drops are plentiful which makes up for the fact you are going to keep very few of them.

If they want to continue to be Destiny with Flight and Diablo 3 Loot… then they need to make the tweaks and turn on the fountain of loot that makes that concept work. Either that or they need to change Legendaries so that they drop as perfectly curated rolls for optimal play if they want them to still be as rare as they are currently. The current combination is an incongruous mess.

I don’t want to abandon hope… I really don’t. However after gearing up all four Javelins to Masterwork level, and with the very limited content that is currently available there isn’t much for me to do right now other than decide either to walk away and cut my losses until “Year Two” and everything magically gets fixed like it did for Destiny, Diablo and The Division… or to keep slamming my forehead into the brick wall until I am dizzy enough not to care about the lack of legendary drops in GM2.

I had heard the term “Reddit Gold” before but never really understood what it was. I had to get Ashgar to explain to me how exactly it works because I legitimately had no clue. Apparently someone paid money to give me an award for that post? Anyways the funny bit about this when I got home and I did my daily run of trying to get a key and then doing a stronghold to use said key, the game decided to actually drop a legendary.

It is actually a fairly good legendary at that, if you are the type of person who enjoys playing with sniper rifles. I run with Siege Breaker for one reason and one reason only… it can freeze targets. Otherwise I would probably never use a sniper rifle in this game, and unfortunately because I know I squandered my luck on this drop it will probably be another week before I see something else. There was someone in the comment thread that theorized that they are working on some sort of a Stronghold challenge similar to Nightfalls in Destiny 2, and that maybe it would reward guaranteed legendaries. There is still supposed to be a large patch in the works for some point this month, so I guess we will wait and see. In the mean time I am trying to decide if doing dailies to get crafting materials and crappy decals is worth logging in on a daily basis.

Since I complain that Anthem is a game that wants to be Diablo 3 but doesn’t exactly understand Diablo 3 Loot…. I decided to play some actual Diablo 3. The last few nights I have been hanging out before bed working on my Crusader on the Switch version, and last night I wound up playing while upstairs in my office piped through my Elgato HD. I find it weird that my default method for playing consoles right now is through a capture card, but it more or less works other than the fact that it doesn’t take amazing screenshots of the switch given the amount of upscaling that happens. Over the weekend I finally beat the main story and now I am focused on running Rifts and doing bounties. Over the last two nights I have worked my way act through act doing a full set of bounties… only to realize that apparently the season that I started playing on is over and that didn’t count towards the normal seasons journey achievement. Ultimately I am progressing too slow to really be worrying too much about seasons in the first place.

Right now I just want to hit 70 so I can gear out in the Thorns set which is hands down my favorite way to Crusader… and a play style that I thought would translate well to handheld mode. By the end of the night I managed to hit 58 and just a little bit away from 59, which means right around the corner I will start being able to collect Deaths Breath and finish unlocking the rest of the stuff in camp. Additionally it means that I will be able to start Cubing some of the low level drops that I have gotten like the Heart of Iron that I managed to get during my 40s. I am still only playing on Hard and have not ratcheted up the difficulty at all… but without Haedrig’s Gift I feel like that ratcheting process is going to go way slower as I try and painstakingly collect a set of Invoker gear.

It would be nice of Haedrig’s Gift worked for pretty much any character to be honest, season or not. The highlight of the night was seeing my very first Menagerist Goblin on the console and it dropped one of my favorite pets… the Flaming Skull. At some point I will have to test out how grouping works as I know a handful of my friends have the copy on Switch. That said this is largely a before bed solo grinding game for me as I find it incredibly relaxing. I do however wish there was a way to link your Blizzard account and get some sort of cross play going on. I somehow doubt that is going to be a thing anytime soon unfortunately.

Capped for A Day

December 3, 2018 by Belghast

Morning folks… I am struggling today. Both in the waking up department because there is simply not enough coffee in the world… and in the illness department because I seem to be coming down with whatever the hell is going around the office. I’ve yet to decide if I can make it to work today, so we will see what happens between now and finishing this post but I am taking a breathing treatment as I type. As far as the weekend I did a bunch of assorted gaming because that seems to be how I roll right now. Instead of focusing hard on one thing I seem to be splitting my time between a bunch of things, and as a result I spent a good deal of time making tiny images and updated my “Recently Playing” sidebar. It mostly follows the post I made last week with the major exception of me apparently forgetting to include Elder Scrolls Online which I still dip my toes into occasionally.

In the Destiny 2 front I spent a good deal of the weekend knocking out anything that could get me a Powerful/Prime Engram and wouldn’t you know it… I reached 600 light the current cap. This is a cap that I will enjoy for another whole day…. because when the black armor DLC releases on December 4th the cap is going up to 650. The truth is I am fine with this.. because the last cap was quite the stretch to get to from the levels I was sitting at when Curse of Osiris released, which is unfortunately the last time I really seriously played the game. Sure I got in and did the Warmind story content and a little bit of planetary stuff but I really was not pushing myself to cap out at that point. Additionally Forsaken made it way easier for someone to play casually and reach the cap, so I am looking forward to Black Armory and some of the new open world “Forge” content as I have always dug things like the Blind Well or Archon’s Forge and Court of Oryx from Destiny 1. I need to get serious about trying to wrangle folks for the purpose of having a raid night… Squirrel keeps volunteering himself but at my count that still leaves us down four people. So if you are interested in that sort of nonsense on the PC platform drop me a line.

Since this is the first post of December I thought I would talk a bit about InPiPoMo which just finished. For years I had not joined in because I largely considered my blog cheating given the nonsense number of screenshots that I post. I apparently have a problem because the goal was to hit 50 “pictures” during the month of November to parallel NaNoWriMo and its 50,000 word count goal… since a “Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”. During the month without really attempting to do so I posted 93 screenshots if my quick count was correct, so yeah… that is a thing I do. Like this morning I had a screenshot of Diablo 3 on the Switch that I wanted to post but nowhere really to post it so I sort of shimmed it into this paragraph. Huge thanks to Chestnut for keeping this going this year and you should totally check out her blog Gamer Girl Confessions.

Over in Monster Hunter World the Winter Star festival is going on and with it a set of gear that you can farm. For both PC and Console players this also means that almost every event that has ever been active is active once again allowing you to farm anything you might have missed. That list is considerably smaller for PC players unfortunately, but it does let you get things like the Wyvern Ignition Great Sword and cosmetic nonsense like the Wiggler head. From what I can tell the only event that is not active is the Code Red event tied to the Devil May Cry cross over potentially because it just ended right before this event. You can however farm Kulve Taroth again until your heart is content. There is a set of lackluster armor that you can craft, or you can do what I did and cash in your tickets towards the layered armor set so you can make ANY gear look like Santa Claus. I plan on farming up enough tickets to also be able to purchase the super adorable Snowman Palico outfit… or Snow Woman in the case of Kenzie who regardless of the game is canonically female.

I’ve talked about how awesome the screenshots are at the end of fights, because they always capture you doing something interesting. In this case it is me dodge rolling out of the way of a line of lightning while everyone else is apparently downhill engaged with the monster. When you hit Hunter Rank 49, in order to make forward momentum you have to face this monster in particular… Tempered Kirin. It took me forever to manage to get this on the console and in truth it was probably only because I was getting carried super hard by Shiana that Ashgar and I wound up getting it at the same time. On the PC I’ve been dipping my toes into these waters for awhile now, and I have reached the point where it is not me that is fainting and causing us to fail… but regardless still end up failing out most of the time. Monster Hunter does this thing where the screen freezes and it can mean either you beat the encounter or someone other than you got carted and caused the whole group to fail. When the screen froze at this point… I just assumed we failed it… but in truth it turns out with one life left to go we managed to take down Tempered Kirin. I will probably NEVER fight this again… that is unless someone who has recently started the PC winds up needing help to get through it. Super happy to be moving again on the other side… which caused me to instantly shoot up to 58.

I also spent a good chunk of the weekend fiddling around in Final Fantasy XIV… which frustratingly has started doing this thing where it does not exit cleanly and strands a black fullscreen window that seemingly has the power to block task manager. This is really only a problem for me personally… since I have been streaming every bit of gaming recently from gaming desktop upstairs to my laptop downstairs. When this happens I have to go upstairs and fiddling with it in order to restore functionality, which can be a bit maddening considering how regularly I am hopping games in a given evening. Regardless I have reached my first wall gear wise in the Main Story Quest and it requires me to get to 335 I believe which means I either need to buy my way out of that hole or start doing enough content to farm up some gear. I am probably going with the later given that I never was rich in Final Fantasy XIV terms. In the meantime however I have decided to revisit my old friend the Palace of the Dead to push my Dark Knight up high enough to be able to do the Heaven on High content the rest of the way to 70. Probably a significant amount of my time will be spent catching up classes so that they are ready when Shadowbringer releases tentatively next summer.

All Things Geekery is a great podcast by my friends Detached and Victus that among other topics tends to be a great source of Destiny 2 related conversations. They have been doing this thing recently where they highlight a member of the community at the beginning of their show, which I thought was a really great idea when they started this concept with the very amazing Chestnut. However I am now starting to question their mental state because apparently they saw fit to include me in this construct as well. This week I apparently am leading off the show, but really you should probably just fast forward past that and listen to their interesting discussion of Red Dead Redemption 2… a game I am super interested in but waiting to see if it releases on the PC given that is my platform of choice and I have a bad habit of rebuying games for it. You can find the podcast at…

Finally there is of course the podcast we recorded this weekend where we talk about Final Fantasy XIV, Monster Hunter World Winter Star event, what happens when MMORPGs close down, Tetris in Virtual Reality and a few other topics shimmed in between. I tend to be really bad about promoting the thing that I actually do, so I should get in the habit of talking about it more on this blog so there is some cross pollination. I am still shocked anyone reads this thing… let alone listens to me ramble on the other thing. At this point I have decided to stay home and crash this morning because I had very few things on my calendar for today. If I had a packed day of meetings I might have struggled through it and probably infected the rest of the office. Now I am going to get in some fuzzy pants and forget the world exists.

Shock to the System

November 13, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I had the day off and I am sorta thankful for that. It means that I missed driving in the first snow of the season. It isn’t that the roads would have been slick or anything… it is just more a case of folks acting crazy in inclement weather. As a result I stayed home and dealt with the air conditioning folks doing our winter maintenance checkup on the system. I also spent a good deal of time playing various video games and also making a batch of Chicken Tikka Masala. My wife unfortunately did not get the day off and as such I wanted something to warm up her belly when she got home.

While waiting on the folks to get here, and while they were doing their thing… I played a lot of Diablo 3 on the Switch and have moved on into Act 2. I like this port of the game quite a bit, but as I have talked about… mobile gaming just doesn’t fit that cleanly into my life. If I have access to my other machines I would probably rather play them… and the switch is just heavy enough to be awkward to play while laying in bed. However I heard last night that apparently the Switch version is what Tamrielo needed to really get into the game as he now has a Necromancer in its 60s… which is significantly higher than I think he has ever gotten a character before? The controls feel good, but for someone who is super used to how things work on the PC… it is taking a lot of adjustment. I equate it to someone reciting a poem you know in a foreign language… you understand what they are saying but there is a lot of translation happening.

As far as most of the day… I spent a good deal of time playing Path of Exile… and I really need to figure out how to leave public channels. I also decided to spend a little money with the game and bought one of the supporter packs that they are just about to phase out when the new expansion releases. I figure at this point I have gotten enough joy out of the game that I really should pay something for it. This gave me a bit of cash shop currency which I then used to get a better looking weapon and shield… though I am wishing I had gone with something else for the shield because it does not match the outfit at all. Basically my gameplay tends to revolve around Molten Strike, Blade Vortex and Leap… everything else is largely superfluous and as such I am completely cool losing W as a keybind to give me back the move forward functionality I am used to in Diablo 3. I flirted briefly with binding leap to spacebar, but ran into issues with the game needing a close all windows keybind to replace the spacebar I took. Once I figure out a decent option for that I might go back to spacebar for leap since I prefer having a movement key bound there.

As far as Monster Hunter World goes… I am in an odd place where I need some Kirin+ items… but for whatever reason do not have access to High Rank Kirin. I spent a good chunk of the night trying various quests to try and whittle down whatever it takes to unlock the High Rank version of the fight, but failing miserably. Essentially I need a couple materials to get the last of my layered armor pieces from the Kulve Taroth event… and I am not sure if I will still be able to do the turn-ins after the event or not. I know that I can craft Kulve Armor without issue, and have gathered up more than enough mats to make a full set of that once I farm up the Elder Dragon gems. I’ve been sitting at Hunter Rank 49 for awhile now, which means that I have to take down a Tempered Kirin. Last night I made several attempts and while one came super close… there is always the problem of someone fainting. In this particular run it was me that failed… but in others I managed to stay alive 100% of the time and someone else got the carts. Ultimately I will get through this… but in reality I just want the parts from it and could care less about moving my Hunter Rank higher at this very moment. Time to research what exactly I need to have already completed to unlock the needed High Rank hunt.

There are so many games right now out that I’ve not had a chance to really devote much time to. On the 16th another one gets added to that stack in the form of Let’s Go Eevee… because Eevee is way cooler than Pikachu. I need to figure out a better way to spend time with the switch because I have quite the backlog right now… because I have not devoted anywhere near enough time to Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate or Starlink Battle for Atlas. The only problem with Switch games is that they look like crap on my 4K setup upstairs, and they are not quite comfortable to play in bed. So I need to figure out a happy middle ground where I feel comfortable playing the games and will also be willing to give up playing something on the PC. Yes I realize these are the first worldiest of problems.

Also in the extreme stack of games that need attention… Fallout 76 launches I believe tonight? Look when someone says Midnight I never quite know if they mean which specific night/morning. I believe it launches tonight at Midnight EST, but when I popped in a moment ago to take screenshots the servers were up. I am wondering if this was by accident, or if they are just going to let people trickle in that happen to try it. Sadly I have work, but I can in fact verify that everything from my B.E.T.A. character is there and functional… minus one turret that I placed on my base. I am not sure if it got blown up, or if something glitched and it fell below the world or something. Regardless Fallout 76 is either launching tonight… or has already launched and it will be tonight before I get to give it any attention. I had a lot of fun with Kodra and Tam running amok, and now I am left with the decision of… do I play my already level 10 character from beta or do I roll something fresh.

Packed Weekend

November 5, 2018 by Belghast

I was off Friday and as a result did something that I had been putting off for far too long. For quite some time now I have had a new case that I needed to shift my main gaming machine into… so that I had enough room to slot the 1080 ti graphics card I picked up for cheap. The problem is it has been a sequence of two things… firstly not wanting to have my machine down on the weekends when I spent most of my time using it and doing things like recording AggroChat. Secondly I have been dealing with some nasty bouts of anxiety and the little voice in my head kept telling me that I would screw something up and be without a gaming machine while I tried to fix it. As a result I have used the powers of avoidance to keep kicking that can down the road until finally last Friday I took care of it. It took me about three hours to gut everything from my previous case and install everything fresh in the new case… with time in between to clean the components before seating them again.

Admittedly I was watching Netflix so was probably greatly slowed down by that as well, but regardless by noon-ish I was up and running and wondering why the hell I waited so long. As is tradition when I get new hardware… I launch what feels like every game I have just to see what it looks like on the highest resolutions. I now have officially entered the realm of 4k gaming… and it is glorious. Sadly these scaled screenshots won’t really do it any justice… but seeing it in motion is gorgeous. The other interesting thing I found out this weekend is that my beloved Parsec client, takes a 4K signal from my machine upstairs… scales it dynamically down to 1080p and delivers it to the laptop without losing a lot of the fine detail. The end result looks like I am running 1080p super sampled to 4k and still providing a much nicer experience than just playing the games at 1080p all without noticeable issues.

Another thing that happened this weekend is that I managed to get together with Tam and Kodra and play the Fallout 76 B.E.T.A. aka… stress test. At some point they sent all of us a few friend codes, and I shared one with a good friend and former coworker that was considering getting into the game. That left me with two codes t hat I offered up to the AggroChat members. Luckily the test times on Saturday happened at a time we could all be online and… while I was enjoying the game solo, it really shines with friends. Just the interaction between three vastly different play styles made it so we were constantly finding different interesting things to get engaged with. I would find a chest and the other two would come over to see what was in it, or Kodra found a base that we could claim… that then lead to an event where we had to build up the defenses and fight off a wave of scorched trying to take it from us. The moment to moment gameplay and little doses of exploration was a glorious thing… and also it ran great at 4k without issues. I am really looking forward to being able to set up a private server for the AggroChat crew to roam around on.

I also spent a decent amount of my time in Destiny 2, and managed to get my light level up to 575 which seems reasonable. I’ve started getting 580 drops from Powerful/Prime Engrams, and I feel like soon the elevator to 600 will start to slow down a bit as has always been the case in Destiny. I am mostly logging in and piddling around and trying to accomplish something that will net me an engram or two but have not really been playing very seriously this week. It feels like there are just too many different things going on for me to really devote all of my resources towards any one of them. I have the desire to play… but the lack of focus to really push harder than I already am.

I still say failure shots in Monster Hunter World are among the most interesting. Right now the Kulve Taroth event is going on and I am trying to make sure I get in a few attempts each day so I can stock pile weapons. So far I have gotten a few really interesting things, but I am less shocked each time I get something cool than I was during the running over on PS4. At this point I have a few useful weapons for pretty much every slot, with the possible exception of Bow. For whatever reason Bows are extremely scarce, and I remember that being the case on Playstation 4 as well… similarly I always seem to get Heavy Bowguns instead of Light Bowguns. I do however have plenty of options to play around with, and I believe all of the items needed to make a full set of Kulve gear… minus the various Elder Dragon gems which I will have to farm later. My primary focus however is collecting the two sets of layered armor, which simply take repetition since the most tickets I have seen in a single run is 4.

Another thing I messed about with this weekend was the demo of World of Warcraft Classic. I started off playing a Tauren Warrior, which is legitimately the first character I ever created during the first stress test I got in back in 2004. However… Warriors about level 15 are miserable… and so is the Barrens… which were sort of this poorly thought out dumping ground of content. Instead I opted to also recreate Lodin my Dwarf hunter and spend time roaming around Westfall. I talk more at length about this on the podcast, but there are so many things that I remember… but only after seeing them in person. Like for example… I did not remember quest text scrolling as slow as it does. That said I now remember seeing out an addon to speed up quest text scrolling, and that was legitimately the first addon I ever installed. There are supposedly some tweaks you can make, but I am proud of blizzard in creating a way to legitimately play on a pseudo classic server with something resembling patch 1.12 on the client. I also applaud them for giving it to the players as part of their normal World of Warcraft subscription. I am likely going to play something up on a classic server, and I think it would be kinda cool to try some of the older content like Molten Core again.

Diablo was effectively the game of the weekend… for reasons other than what I am about to talk about. However I have been enjoying the hell out of playing Diablo 3 on the Switch, and wound up playing for quite a bit last night from bed. I’ve not spent a lot of time with a console version of Diablo in spite of having Reaper of Souls on the PS4, in part because if I have access to a console… I can just play the PC version of the game I have devoted so many hours to. However the switch is an interesting case because in theory I could drag it to work and play it over lunch, getting in some demon slaying on the go. All in all I have enjoying the experience of playing it with the switch, and while blizzon was going on I was largely playing this in docked mode while watching the streams.

As far as the other Diablo news… for the moment I am just going to link to our podcast from this weekend… because we spent the majority of the show talking about it. I have thoughts still that I will ultimately put into blog post form… in fact there were a few points during the weekend when I started drafting something in Google Docs, only to delete it all shortly after. For the moment I am disappointed in both Blizzard and the Diablo Community, but am generally okay with a Mobile Diablo existing because Dragalia Lost has proved to me that it might be something I would be interested in. It is going to take me a bit to work through my thoughts fully however because they are somewhat nuanced. For now however… this is already a massive post so closing things out.