Diablo Franchise Archives - Page 41 of 55

Boosts and Buffs

April 7, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve officially reached the point in the Diablo 3 season where I can straight up wreck at least early torment content, which means… I can boost my friends. Last night I snagged Byx, Ammo and Sol and drug them through a few Nephilim rifts until they came out level 70s on the other side. In truth I am rather horrible at boosting people… I tend to overclear because my tank instincts kick in and I desperately want to protect my fledgling charges. So that means that the individual Rifts probably take way longer than they should. However it also means if you are being boosted by me… you are not only walking away with levels but also with a sizable amount of cash and gems. Sadly the loot is functionally meaningless until you hit 70. However since Byx was way ahead of the rest of the crew I am pretty certain she walked with some decent loot as well. The funny thing with writing about how much I was not feeling this season… is that it actually made me really want to play. The moment I posted the blog post I logged in and did a solo greater rift before heading into work that day, and each night since I have at least spent a little bit of time playing. After the boostery, I connected with Grace and we did a couple of rounds of bounties since we were both in desperate need of the crafting materials. I technically have everything that I need gear wise apart from one legendary gem, and a single ring…. but everything could be improved by getting some ancients which have been in short supply thus far.

After playing some Diablo 3 on the laptop, I decided to go upstairs and check out the latest patch for Mass Effect Andromeda. All in all there have been a lot of subtle improvements to the way that the character models look. In truth I think there are a bunch of improvements to the game in general because the worlds just feel better looking. This might of course be the placebo effect, and because they said they patched…. it is making my brain desperately want to see the improvements. However at the very least my Ryder and all of the characters I am interacting with seem more normal looking. The Botox face is largely gone… and the fully open surprise eyes seems to be gone as well. I am pretty pleased with the results because this little bit of window dressing has fixed a lot of my gripes about the game. On the other side of the equation on non-cosmetic changes… the general inventory increases are also amazing. I feel like I am no longer needing to deconstruct items in the middle of a planet rather than waiting for me to be back on my ship. Similarly the ability to tab out of the flight animations while in a solar system makes that just work better, and I am wondering if there is some option I can check in the settings to default to disabled so I don’t need to hit tab.

I put a few hours in last night and in truth probably played about thirty minutes longer than I should have… for my sanity… and my sleep patterns. I really like this game and It definitely is up in the game of the year territory for me. The problem there is… so is Zelda Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn… and all of those were released in the first quarter of the year. I guess in a way I am extremely thankful for all of these games, because with the way the real world is turning out… this seems to be the golden age of escapism. It is comforting to be able to lose yourself in a deep and rich game, and completely forget that the world is apparently on fire and someone replaced the fire extinguisher with a can of easy cheese. There are just so damned many quests that I have picked up and that are littering my inventory that I need to spend one entire night trying to burn those down before I move forward. I will probably always be grossly over-leveled for the content as a result… but whatever I have my trust Rank V Pioneer Gun. I just gotta say that once I stumbled onto the weapons provided by the DLC… or more so I stumbled onto how to GET the DLC items… I fell in love with the Auto Rifle. Yes I keep giving mine bizarre names because I’ve had to craft each after the first one…. but whatever it is a freaking awesome gun. More importantly… Ashgar can be happy that I have finally moved on past the Avenger.

Seasons End

April 4, 2017 by Belghast

Last Friday was the beginning of the tenth season of Diablo 3. In the lead up I had just about convinced myself simply to skip this one, because I really was not feeling it this go around. Generally speaking I chase the pet that is being offered as part of the seasons journey… and this time around there was no pet. Instead they offered the weird lamp post back piece thing you can see me wearing in the above image. However as time got closer to the launch I opted in given that I at least knew that Grace would be playing. While I do not at all regret doing this… I lacked the proper amount of steam that I normally have going into this sort of thing. Firstly I got home a little later than intended and by the time I had nommed some dinner I was about fifteen to twenty minutes behind Grace and Noreek. I think as a whole everyone pretty much either forgot that the season start was a thing… or they themselves had petered out as well. Normally on season launch night my friends list is completely chock full of little green leaves… aka the icon that represents a seasonal character. Instead of the usual twenty plus… there were five and two of them were in my party. I went Demon Hunter largely because they seem to be extremely easy to push through the seasonal journey content. Generally speaking I greatly prefer the Crusader, but they are not exactly known for their clear speeds.

Now it is not to say that I did not enjoy myself like I often do. Noreek was attempting to follow some best practices and for whatever reason, our luck did not hold out. In theory one of the first patterns you are supposed to get is the Cain set, which allows you to have a significant experience boost. However after doing a couple of rounds of bounties and none of us getting the book… we finally gave up and returned to Nephilim Rift grinding. However you could audibly tell that we were losing steam when about 8:30 or 9 pm voice chat started to get completely silent. I myself was just sort of barely hanging in there and I think I wound up tagging out around 10 pm and heading to bed to play a little switch before nodding off completely. It sounds like the rest of the group did not make it terribly further, with me leaving somewhere in my 50s and Grace only making it to I believe 59 before calling it a night. Each season it seems like we make it a shorter distance in the initial push before finally calling it. That first season for me I think I made it to 65 before calling it a night and by the time I logged in the next morning Grace was already paragon 150 or so.

I am super thankful to Noreek for giving me the much needed boost on Sunday to get to 70 and start unlocking the first few pieces of gear from Haedrig’s Gift. I turned that into a season finish Sunday night during the Walking Dead season finale. So now I am technically finished with the cosmetic portion of the season and trying to sort out how much further I am going to go. The set this season for Demon Hunters is Maurader’s which seems pretty easy to push content in. I just need to get to get the drive to do so… because last night I had ample opportunity to play because I knew Grace was going to be playing. However for whatever reason I just lacked the desire to log in… so instead I did something that was completely fruitless and ground random Hive mobs on the Dreadnaught for hours trying to get my Husk of the Pit for Necrochasm. I knocked out a few things on the Slayer list, and in doing so knocked out a few things it seems on the lists after that. I could in theory probably get an extra bank tab rather easily this season… if I can just muster the desire to do so. Right now it feels like I have this wealth of other things to be playing, so buckling down and playing Diablo 3… a game that is more than well trodden at this point just seems difficult. In all of this I am sort of saddened by the fact that it seems the magic of the seasonal journey is diminished. I’ve written several posts in the past talking about how much fun it is to push with your friends in an atmosphere like the launch of a new MMO… and that seems to be lacking this time around.

Restless Weekend

January 23, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a bit of an odd one, because at least for me it centered around recording our “Games of the Year” show on AggroChat. This is generally speaking a huge ordeal given that our show is made up of six very different minded people. Back during the days when we had four regular hosts it was less of a proceeding but now that we essentially have six people each picking three games a piece… that means we wind up talking about 18 games, which as it turns out divides neatly into two 9 image panels. The above image is the first of these and serves as the backdrop for our normal show card of sorts, however with the text over it you can’t necessarily make out all of the images involved so I decided to post it here. You can as always find the show on AggroChat or my method of choice for sheer simplicity of listening… YouTube. The reason why this largely dominated my weekend is because we ultimately recorded two podcasts that were both two hours long before I set down to edit them. Post edits they both clock in around an hour and twenty minutes, which really is shocking given that I did not actually time anything out in an attempt to make them work as relative set pieces. I guess however if you set out to record nine games per show… the end result comes out fairly evenly. I did make an attempt to shuffle the deck in such a way as to put the games I thought we would most likely talk the longest about divided evenly among the shows.

So we recorded from 8 pm CST until just after midnight, and then I got up around 7:30 Sunday morning and edited until 12:30… and as a result every other element of the weekend felt like it was shoved to one side or the other. Of course all of this madness has a purpose since the double episode is timed perfectly to cover the absence of myself and Ashgar as we go to Pax South. Now in theory Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen could record without me… but that would mean I had the forethought to have the mess that is our show in a state that I could easily hand over the reigns to an understudy. I have not planned ahead that far, and while I do have a series of Audacity and Photoshop projects to speed up the process… I am not sure if I could even properly explain what exactly I do each week. It is my hope however that I managed to not only publish yesterday, but also schedule everything else to publish next Sunday while I am driving home from San Antonio. Staging a publish to happen without me is always a fraught thing for me… because so rarely does it actually work as intended. Even if it does… I am literally stressed beyond reason until I see the tweets show up in my timeline from the publish process actually doing its thing appropriately. In the grand scheme of things however… it is not the most important thing in the world… but it is important to me.

As far as gaming went this weekend that was equally scattered. I patched up Final Fantasy XIV and made it far enough to hit the first instance gate, before ultimately walking away. Similarly I patched up Wildstar, created a Chua Warrior and played to around level seven before once again walking away like a bored child. As far as gaming that managed to last for more than an hour… we had World of Warcraft where I finally hit 35 points on my Protection Artifact and started pushing up Fury instead. I have gotten back in the habit of logging in each day to do my Emissary quest because now there is also a potential legendary upgrade waiting at the end of the grind. I started doing my Time Walking dungeons… but only managed to make it through the first one tanking it before once again wandering away. The game that seemed to stick the hardest was Elder Scrolls Online where I completed a good chunk of Malabal Tor, a zone where I am already completely enthralled by the storyline… even though it involves largely nothing but elves and their internal politics. I’ve decided that the Bosmer are what it takes to make me really enjoy Elves. I am really enjoying the whole lore regarding the Green Lady and the Silvenar, and I guess in truth that was an aspect of the lore that I had either forgotten or ignored in playing other Elder Scrolls games. I even managed to have a few emotional gut punches last night, when I lost characters that I actually really liked during one quest chain. In truth all I want to do right now is hide in my blanket cocoon on the couch and play more ESO, but that said I do want to at some point get a Mythic+ in for the week since I have a +5 Maw of Souls key.

Flawless Royal Warlock

January 10, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I had every intent of attempting to get a Nightfall going. As a result when I first got home from work I grabbed some food and popped upstairs to fiddle about on my warlock. It is odd how my order of enjoyment has shifted when it comes to my alts. Nothing is ever going to dislodge Titan as my primary class in Destiny, but the other two appear to be in a state of flux. Originally speaking my secondary character was always my Hunter, and my Warlock generally sat in this realm of just one or two steps removed from “afterthought”. However with Rise of Iron and even some of the late Taken King content… that sort of shifted around and I tend to enjoy my time spent on the Warlock far more than the Hunter. I think part of it is that the movement options for the Hunter seem awesome at face value… but double jump just feels more limited than either the Titan or Warlock jumps. Admittedly I have constant issues with the Warlock jump because it essentially works backwards of that of the Titan. However in both cases it feels like I can get where I am needing to go more easily than trying to time a bunch of jumps in order to get up to anyplace high. On the Hunter I feel like there is never a situation where I do not want to be using the Bones of Eao… so much so that I question if it would not simply be better for the class if that Exotic were phased out and that function just defaulted. I still wish there were artifacts that allowed you to switch which jump your class had… because in truth I would still give everyone the Titan jump if given the chance.

Now I said I had every intent of running a Nightfall last night, but instead when my wife managed to make it home I popped back downstairs to fix her some dinner. After doing so however instead of filtering back up to my office, I decided to chill downstairs on the sofa with her… which mean’t no PS4. I realize I am one of the only people on the planet for which “sofa gaming” does not mean a console, but I have all of my consoles hooked up next to my gaming PC in my office so I can capture from them easily… and also that is where the Television that I can dominate lives. Before long I was on the laptop and playing some more Diablo, and eventually connected with some friends chain running Rifts for fun and profit. All in all it was a really good night for me and progression, because firstly… managed to get all of my gems to “Flawless Royal” level. Additionally I managed to knock out a few more items from my set build namely that I now have the right armor and “weapon” in my cube. I am now down to a place where the only things I am missing are my jewelry… but these are also some of the more expensive items to buy from Kadala. There is a more powerful Legacy of Nightmares build that I am working towards, largely because I have never actually tried doing a build using that pair of rings. The game apparently wants me to try it however since I wound up with an Ancient version of one of the rings last night. However I am in the very awkward place of needing Justice Lantern, both pieces of the Endless Walk jewelry set, and the ever present Convention of Elements in the cube. On a positive note last night I managed to pick up a pair of Nemesis Bracers which I can swap with my Heart of Iron in the cube to make farming runs go more smoothly. Additionally I managed to get all three of my primary build gems over level 25 so they finally start doing interesting things. All of these things combined seem to now allow me to pretty easily farm Torment X content, which means that 7/10 of the next Seasonal step is knocked out… with the only truly heinous thing left being mastering the set dungeon. For that I am largely going to need to tweak my build because I don’t actually use consecrate anymore, although it is definitely worth trying given how bed of nails works with it.

Tonight however… will most definitely be a night for Destiny because in theory it should be easier to get two characters through Nightmares on reset day 🙂