Diablo Franchise Archives - Page 39 of 55

Yoinking Yang

September 25, 2018 by Belghast

It is always staggering how much difference a few pieces of gear make in Diablo 3. I went from being unable to really function… to being able to push Torment X without much issue. I could potentially go higher but I have not really pushed myself. As of this morning I did a solo 40 just to verify that I was wrecking things as fast as I thought I was… and of course upgrade that blood shard capacity. Last night after a mythic+ in World of Warcraft I dropped back over into Diablo 3 and with a whole lot of Grace’s help started running content to attempt to get drops. Over the course of numerous rifts and greater rifts I managed to start piecing together the set that I should be using to make the Unhallowed Essence build work.

This is where I am at as of this morning, with everything acquired minus Wraps of Clarity and the Focus ring. From there I need one of those doodads that adds a slot to a weapon… and to reroll a bunch of my gear for more optimal stats. Then of course there is the game of trying to swap out your normal items with better ancient versions. Regardless however I am functioning so much better than I was and can finally stand on my own two feet again. I was in this awkward spot for too long where I could survive the higher torments… but just couldn’t kill anything fast enough. That all changed once I got a handful of items and started finally being able to keep up with Grace and her Necro pushing machine. The funny thing is… she STILL doesn’t have the ring she needs to make her set completely work… and I have somehow managed to get almost nothing but ring drops myself.

Another thing of note that I thought I would talk about this morning is my plans for Fallout 76. My good friend Shiana pinged me last night about what I was planning for Fallout and also for Anthem. He knows me too well, in that he didn’t phrase the question as to IF I was playing… just where I was playing. As it stands right now I plan on doing both on the PC since that is the more comfortable platform for me personally. As far as Fallout 76, when they announced that you could run a private server… I set my mind on trying to acquire one of these. My hope is that TypeFrag will offer one since I like their group funding model that allows people to chip in if they so choose to the server rental fees. We use that for the Teamspeak server that we use for recording AggroChat, and it is nice mostly because it means I am not footing the entire bill on my own.

Regardless of who is paying I plan on having a server with as close to a PVE ruleset as the game allows me. It will be a nice chill carebear haven with as many of the toxic influences filtered out as possible. Basically I think this game is going to be amazingly fun pending you can gather up the right mindset of players that are willing to work together and build interesting communities. The nukes will of course exist, but the hope is that we nuke areas of high mob population and not players… and sorta treat it like a raid zone since it will cause interesting stuff to spawn in from what I have read. If you want a chill place to play Fallout 76 and are cool with a no PVP ruleset, then this oasis may be the place for you.

Tam Stole My Luck

September 24, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was the beginning of the 15th season in Diablo 3 and like usual Grace and myself decided to do the thing that we do roughly every three months… and start new seasonal characters. I went with the Demon Hunter because the Unhallowed Essence set is in theory one of the really fun ones… pending I can actually assemble all of the parts of it. Grace went with the Necro because I believe this time is Rathma’s which is another pretty fun set… pending you assemble all of the pieces of it. For most of the season she was way stronger than I was as we ran through the content, but there will be a point where that balance starts to shift the other way. The problem is I have not hit it yet and am struggling a bit with pushing content. I found getting the Greater Rift 20, the last thing I needed for my cosmetic items and last of the Haedrig’s Gift items… but be extremely painful.

This season I seem to have had really bad luck, essentially having NONE of the items I need for my build apart from the Hellfire Amulet. Legendaries seem to be extremely stingy this time around, and often times as I am leveling I start getting some of the drops needed to toss into the cube. That didn’t happen. In theory I am going to start grinding some T1 rifts to try and assemble the rest of the set. I am convinced that Tam stole my luck, because I didn’t even get a single item of my class set to upgrade to Ancient. At a bare minimum however I now have my pet and portrait frame and anything after this is gravy.

In World of Warcraft I mostly spent time this weekend over on the Alliance side leveling my Paladin. Paladins right now seem just as overpowered as Demon Hunters and I have been breezing through content pulling tons of things in a path of destruction… and in truth consecration ends up pulling way more than I had intended most of the time. Originally when I took a stab at playing the Death Knight I had started Stormsong Valley and could not be bothered with that storyline of missing ships. This time around I decided to start Drustvar and its awesome cultist nonsense… and so far I have been enjoying the storytelling way more than a tale of political intrigue. I like big bombastic storylines, like the whole fighting old gods with ghost dinosaurs thing that is going on over on the Horde Side, so Drustvar seems more of that fit.

The only negative is it means at some point I will have to return to the more subtle political intrigue storyline and hopefully I am invested enough in my character at that point to carry me on. I figured the Paladin gave me a lot of options for running stuff… but the truth is I will probably just tank or dps… and it is highly unlikely that I ever heal. While I technically got the healing Artifact weapon, I am not sure if I ever had it equipped. All in all though… just not loving the Alliance content anywhere near as much as I did the Horde. However I will say so far… the War Campaign stuff seems cooler on the Alliance side… even though it feels weird to be retracing steps I know as horde quests. I did not realize that I would be effectively sharing the same space… like Anyport for example in my world is very much a Horde town… but it is seemingly also open to Alliance? Also finding it weird that I am seeing way more Orange names while I am leveling than Blue ones. Maybe there was an initial push of alliance players… or maybe the AIE presence on our shared shard greatly pushes the balance to Horde.

Lastly we recorded another podcast this weekend as is the usual, and this time around we talked a lot about the Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest franchise… and the fact that I think of it as Warrior is telling to the last time I actually played one. We also had this unintended deep dive into Hollow Knight after some conversation about Hyperlight Drifter sort of jarred it loose. We are trying really hard to bring the shows in around an hour in length and as such they sort of feel better than they used to. We are trying to limit the number of topics… which has this side effect of causing topics to roll forward to other weeks. The Dragon Quest topic for example had rolled twice before we finally talked about it. I am thinking the Trello system that we are using for show notes seems to work pretty well, as we can drop things into the queue throughout the week easily. Regardless… if you tried listening to us when we often times recorded two to three hour long shows…. you might give it a shot again.

Champion and Stonefalls

June 22, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I managed to do enough greater rifts to push my three gems of choice to level 35… which means I have now finished the second post chapter of Season 14. I am now two steps into Destroyer where the challenges get harder as to the prize amounts. I feel like this is a reasonable place to take a break since my often partner in crime in this Diablo nonsense is having to deal with some real world stuff. I do however intend to keep running the occasional run to farm up some gold. I am completely flat broke at this very moment… or at least 600k gold which FEELS flat broke in the Diablo 3 seasonal post game. I spent a chunk of time transmuting gems for the purpose of trying to slot the best green gem into every item that would take one.

This will be essentially the last performance and damage output boost I can make that does not involving swapping item for item with an Ancient Legendary equivalent. You can see on the profile of my seasonal character that I currently have four ancient legendaries… but of those one doesn’t really count given that I am wearing nemesis bracers just for the purpose of burning through Rifts faster. I’ve been spending all of my blood shards with Kadala on chest pieces in the random hope of getting an ancient version of the Marauders chest, but really at this point it is just picking a slot and grinding on it until luck rewards me for my futility.

I also need to determine what conquest I will plan on going with this season, or technically conquests if I intend to go deep enough in to get the extra bank slot. The conquests available this season are…

Avarice – Complete a 50,000,000 gold streak while outside The Vault and the Inner Sanctum
Speed Demon – Complete a Nephalem Rift at Max level on Torment X or Higher within 2 minutes
Years of War – Reach Greater Rift Level 55 Solo with the full bonuses of Six of the Following Class Sets
Divinity – Reach Greater Rift Level 75 Solo
On A Good Day – Level three Legendary Gems to 65

Of those the two most obvious and probably easiest are Divinity and On A Good Day given that those sorta happen in the normal flow of the game. Figuring out which third one I want to do is probably going to be the biggest issue. Maybe Grace and I could get fast enough to do a T10 Rift together within 2 minutes, especially if we could find some more people to help us out and just sorta go in different directions during each level racking up kills. Avarice is all about building a specific set for it and then gathering up all of the trash in a specific area and trying to kill it all at once. I guess I should be holding onto those gold boosting items just in case I want to go down that route.

The other thing I did last night was run around in Elder Scrolls Online for a couple hours. I gotta say this game is really gorgeous and even thought Stonefalls is probably the worst zone in the game (though Ashgar would probably fight me and claim that Alakir Desert is)… it is still breathtakingly beautiful with its alien mushroom landscapes. I am trying to push through this area because Stonefalls is really the major impediment for almost all of my attempts to level through the Ebonheart content. As a reminder to my readers… I am stubborn as fuck when it comes to Elder Scrolls Online and am not willing to try any of the expansion content until I have beaten the original content. That means I started off in Daggerfall and leveled all the way through those zones. Then I entered the new game plus… which was Aldmeri Dominion on the same character and have leveled through all of that. Finally I am in the process of leveling my way through Ebonheart Pact at which point… I will happily begin gobbling up the expansions.

The primary reason behind this is that I know people who worked on this game and feel like I want to see every last bit of the original content. There is a town in the Rift area in Ebonheart that has namesake characters for myself, Ashgar, Warenwolf, and Audrae… and while I saw them during beta I want to see them legitimately with my main character. I feel like maybe I am ready to buckle down and start pushing through the content and finally reach that goal I have been working on since 2014. Ultimately Elder Scrolls Online is a game I have been playing off and on in one form or another since February of 2013, and the amount of effort that I put into beta testing probably stalled out my eventual post release progress. That said I am deeply proud of being a member of the Psijic Order… what they called the alpha testers and proud of what this game has ultimately become.

Falcon’s Wings

June 21, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was another night in Diablo 3 and I managed to whittle down the remaining objectives in Champion down to one… raise 3 gems to 35. This is more tedium than it is difficult since I can do 45 greater rifts pretty quickly… the challenge is simply not dying and getting that bonus gem level each go round. Demon Hunter is very much a glass cannon and it gets frustrating sometimes when a single hit can send you to the graveyard, but I am getting better at vaulting to safety. The challenge however is now that I have swapped over to the grenades build… there is so much going on with the grenade bounces that it can be extremely hard to actually see incoming attacks that might KO me.

For most of the season so far I have been running the Yang and Rockets build that while it isn’t exactly the same as this one… the one I was running is fairly similar. Last night was all about finishing out the pieces I needed to swap over to the more appropriate seasonal Manticore/Cluster Bombs build that supposedly has a much higher damage potential. The one thing I loved about Multishot is that I could hang way the hell away from my targets and just pepper the screen with nonsense, allowing me to pretty safely clear everything without needing to “get my hands dirty” as it were. This is a play style that absolutely fits the Demon Hunter because it kept me largely safe and at a significant distance to react to incoming damage.

Cluster Bombs however feel like I need to be way closer to the action and as a result spending much more of my time vaulting around the screen trying not to die to poison puddles or explosions. I am adjusting but I still find it less enjoyable overall than the multishot route. That said… Rift Guardians just completely melt at this point when you hit them with a slew of bouncing grenades. I’ve reached the point where the normal mobs are the problem not the bosses because I have enough stacked up boss damage that they just seem to evaporate. By the end of the night I had gathered up all of the pieces of gear I needed for the build and am now working on getting those gems up.

The highlight of the evening however is one specific drop. Grace and I were splitting up and doing a full round of bounties for cube materials, when she was not paying attention and apparently opened the chest in Garden’s of Hope Tier 1… that contained the cosmetic Falcon’s Wings. I thought for certain that they would have only dropped for the people who happened to be in zone at that moment… but apparently that is not the case. I ported to Grace and sure enough the wings were sitting there on the ground waiting for me to loot them. I’ve spent time in the past farming for these without much luck, and it seems to be the way of Diablo 3 that the only time something drops for you… is when you aren’t expecting it at all.

A couple of interesting notes from the Season of Greed double goblins event. Firstly between the two of us we have yet to see a single puzzle ring drop, and the only time we have made it into Greed’s Realm is when a Gilded Baron opened a portal for us. Second note… we have yet to see a single Menagerist Goblin spawn so our dreams of double pet drops have been dashed so far. Similarly we have yet to see any Rainbow Goblins… so no whimsydale nonsense either. We are however seeing a ton of the gem and material goblins… which are awesome but less interesting than the ones that can drop something really rare. All in all I am having a blast and spent from 7 pm onwards last night playing Diablo 3… first solo and then duo’ed up with Grace. I am having more fun this season than I have had in a very long time.