Diablo Franchise Archives - Page 43 of 54

Weekend Rusty

August 6, 2016 by Belghast

Demon-Huntering

I promise that I had every intention of getting up this morning and writing a blog post immediately following breakfast. However the world had other plans… or more truthfully my friends Grace and Sol had other plans. Last night was the beginning of the Diablo 3 Season 7, but unlike so many other season starts I had other plans. Firstly yesterday was the birthday of my amazing wife, and I ended up taking off a half day to go out to lunch and then to a movie. We saw Ghostbusters, and I have things to say about that movie but it is probably going to be a discussion for another day. After that we came home briefly where my folks came over and brought a cake, and then it was off to a semi-monthly dinner with some of my wife’s siblings. By the time we got home it was after nine and after sitting down to start working on a character I found that I was fading extremely fast. So I only managed to make it to around level 25 before crashing, and during all of this… I forgot to take any screenshots for the blog. As a result I popped in early this morning with the purpose of taking a few screenshots and logging right back out. However this is the one where Grace and Sol invited me to a group… and when I joined and explained that I was only online to take a screenshot or two… they both “noped” and proceeded to drag me up in levels a bit.

As a result I am getting a late start to this whole weekend posting thing, which is not terribly surprising given that I have always had trouble staying on focus during the weekends. Something about getting up and milling around the house causes the morning to lack a clear sense of purpose. I think the key to the week days functioning at all is the fact that I get up and take a shower the moment I crawl out of bed, which serves to wake me up completely. This whole leisurely getting up, having breakfast, and nestling into the couch with my laptop business is a recipe for slacking off. Regardless I am blogging now because Grace decided to go out for coffee giving me a nice break in the leveling process to knock out this post. Firstly I am not nearly as pumped about D3 this season as I was in previous seasons. Right now there is just too much stuff going on that I want to be participating in. Namely at the moment my seeming fresh re-addiction to World of Warcraft. Tuesday we can start rolling Demon Hunters, and I figure that will pretty much be the end of my Diablo 3 season experience. Additionally I still have my Warlock that I am enjoying leveling, and I want to continue pushing it to 100 as soon as possible. At the moment I am knee deep in Talador around level 94, but once again I am doing the method of leveling where I jump zones as soon as possible so as soon as I hit 96 I will be shifting to Spires of Arak.

This feels very much like a scattered post and I guess in a way it is. I am so very not used to doing this weekend blogging thing. This is the first weekend post I have made since breaking my streak of blogging every single day in May. These couple of months have been more than enough to push me out of the habit. In truth I think I enjoy not blogging on the weekend because there is nothing really hanging over me. That isn’t strictly true I guess because I still end up having to edit and get posted the AggroChat episode each Sunday morning, but that at least gives me Saturday to be relatively carefree. From a standpoint of our lifestyle it has been pretty huge as well because it means that my wife and I can get up and around and go out and do things, without having to wait for the inspiration to hit me… and a blog post to mysteriously appear on the page and get posted. So while I am doing this for Blaugust I absolutely expect to return to posting week days once the month of August is over. I am a prime example of trying to find a livable schedule to blog on, and this is a huge part of why I decided to do the more chill version of the initiative. Sure we can push ourselves to come up with thirty one blog posts, and it is an interesting exercise… but if the end result is resentment towards your blog or blaugust in general then I think the overall mission of promoting blogging on a schedule has failed. For the time being however I am returning to my games and calling this post to a close.

Regularly Playing: June Edition

June 29, 2016 by Belghast

Back in May I decided to make a monthly ritual of “truing up” my “Regularly Playing” widget on the sidebar to more closely represent the games I quite literally was playing on regular rotation. Given that it is that time again… here is the list of things for June. I added a few new games into the mix and also removed a few more… even if one is really only temporary. Doing the thing where I write a blurb about what I happened to be doing in each of them.

Rift

In a weird bit of nostalgia, I decided to come back to Rift and give it another push. There has never really been a period of time when I have not actually at least dabbled in this game, but so many times I failed to gain traction. This time around I somehow managed to push from 61 to 65 and have started on this mad mission to raise all of my tradeskills. Now having almost accomplished that I will be pushing into the Planetouched Wilds and giving it a real amount of effort. On top of this I am focused heavily on my crafting dailies, which often times means I need to venture out into the world in search of Sarleaf and Thalasite. With the shift of WoW to the Garrison for most of your farming needs… I had forgotten just how much I really did love going off and ore farming. There is just something relaxing about wandering around a zone with a purpose, looking for the next ore pop and trying to get to it before anyone else notices. It is this weird game within a game that actually seems to work well for me. I spent many an hour flying circles around Icecrown or Sholazar Basin in Wrath… and now am loving doing the same thing for Gelboro Reef. Largely I am focused on that zone since, firstly I know it pretty well… and secondly the mobs are low enough level that I can go afk as needed and make it back to the keyboard before something actually kills me. I am certain that I could be farming ore while wandering around the Planetouched Wilds, but the mobs out there are truly brutal. Whatever the reason… I am deeply invested in Rift and its community once more and loving it.

Destiny: The Taken King

While I have slowed down considerably in this game, there are still regularly sessions of it… namely because I have been trying to get fellow AggroChat member and good friend of mine Grace settled in game. Monday night we managed to get her to level 40, and pushed through the Taken King quest content… which means that there is an entirely new world waiting for her of endgame stuff. With Iron Banner going on this weekend, I highly expect that the two of us will be working on that or at least attempting to show her the ropes of the event. We also have several more steps in the recruit a friend process, but as we get her gear level up there it should get easier to do cooler stuff. Other than that other games have taken priority over the last few weeks, namely with my return to active duty in FFXIV and running stuff in Rift. Hopefully the Iron Banner will be a good event to get me back into focus and moving forward in Destiny once more. I feel pretty disconnected, and I miss the Thursday night Challenge of Elders stuff horribly, I just had a few crazy weeks with the St Louis trip, and Kansas City trip… and a bunch of other random occurrences that knocked me out of my schedule. Hopefully I can start to rebuild said schedule and get moving forward once more.

ArcheAge

In a similar fashion to Rift, I have suddenly become involved and attached to the ArcheAge community as well. Right now I am largely focused on leveling, but at some point I plan on doing all the tradeskilly things in this game as well. Last year the AggroChat crew made a serious push into this game, and while we faded into the background… I still found it extremely enjoyable. Additionally like I said yesterday, many of the early toxic aspects of the community as a whole seem to be gone. Right now I am trying to get back in tune with the game and try and remember how the hell to do half of the things. On the positive as I grind away at questing I seem to keep getting really nice drops for weapons and armor… however I remember that most of the best stuff I had was crafted. I just happened to time my return to coincide with some welcome back campaign, and I keep accruing rewards into my inventory that at some point I will figure out how to use. Mostly I would like to hit the level cap before worrying too much with them, but I believe some of them are xp bonuses that I might as well use now. If you are actively playing I am Belglaive on the Tahyang server, but I am not sure what all it requires to actually friend someone in game. I am not sure if cross server friends lists are a thing there like they are in Rift.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

I spent most of the month deeply frustrated with this game, namely because I was sitting at what felt like an artificial gear cap and being prevented from progressing in the story. Since then however I managed to get a Void Ark run with some friends and got over whatever anxiety I happened to have about tanking it. As a result I am now sitting at 205 gear score, and bumping up against the Nidhogg trial in the story. It is my hope that at some point this week I can get a few friends together and run this and hopefully complete the 3.3 patch story. I am still enjoying the game, but I lack the drive to play it… that I have in say Rift or ArcheAge right now. For at least the foreseeable future my activity in game is probably going to be limited to our Tuesday night activities, or the occasional expert or other event that I organize with friends. I love playing this game… but right now I only seem to love playing it with a group of friends logged in at the same time. It is still an amazing game, but it has shifted into the sort of role that World of Warcraft has been in the past… that game that I only played when there was an organized activity.

World of Warcraft

This one admittedly is barely making the list, and keeping its space on my sidebar. Right now I am occasionally logging in to run Garrisons and get my free gold, but not doing much more other than that. There has been talk of myself, grace and a few others doing random old world content for transmoggy bits and honestly… that right now is about all I am interesting in World of Warcraft as a whole. I feel like I am in a “desperately waiting for the Legion pre-patch” mode. Largely because I am tired of not having any bank space, and removing any of my outfits is simply not an option. I am not joking when I say that right now the only important thing to me in this game… is looking cool with my collection of old raid gear littering my bank vault. If the new transmog system were actually patched in… I would more than likely go through a flurry of activity as I once again do awesome old world content for cool threads. However I quite literally have hit a point where I maybe have 15 bag slots total between inventory, bank and void storage…. so I simply cannot play Belghast anymore without risking removing something. So instead… I run the occasional garrison mission as I alternate through my army of alts… and then log out once again.

Things Removed From List

Overwatch

Zero clue why on this one… but the game released and I just have had no desire to really play it. I am amped about just how excited everyone else seems to be about this game, but honestly it feels like I am more interested in talking about the world and the characters… than actually playing it. If the player versus bots game were more compelling I would likely play it more often, but right now it feels like to enjoy it I need a group of friend to play it. Ironically I have a huge group of friends playing it… but I think I am going through a “quiet time” phase where I just want to piddle around on my own in games rather than do a lot of organized play. The few nights I rode along with people… I lasted 3 to 4 games before feeling the need to run and hide again. I am certain at some point I will once again get the Overwatch bug, but the truth is I am just not that into competitive games.

Diablo 3

Removing this one again temporarily because well…. the season is over. I have accomplished everything I could ever hope to accomplish, and now is the quiet time until the next patch. This will be returning once again as another season starts and we all go through the crazy happy madness that is a season launch. For a bit I was still farming for pets and such, but with the addition of several games this got removed from the docket. I still very much love this game and look forward to adding it back to the list, but for the moment we are in the off season and the game for me at least is dormant.

Regularly Playing

March 7, 2025May 27, 2016 by Belghast

Yesterday I decided to start “truing up” my “Regularly Playing” section of my hot bar. This area has been through many changes throughout the years and the whole idea was just to let readers know what I am actually playing right now. It originally started as me simply i-framing in the information from Raptr… but since I don’t actually use that server or any other equivalent games tracker that isn’t going to work. I shift games quite often, and I wanted a way to indicate what games are currently “on tap”. So this shifted from “Now Playing” to “Frequently Playing” and eventually wound up with the verbiage of “Regularly Playing”. The goal now is to evaluate the list once a month and make adjustments to keep it “mostly true”. I realize I am finger quoting a lot of shit in this post, but the truth is I come home and log into whatever seems enjoyable unless I have a specific activity planned that night. Over time some stuff fades away and other games get added, so I thought as part of this process I would talk a bit about where I am currently in each game on the list, as well as a bit about any that I might have removed or didn’t quite make the cut.

Destiny: The Taken King

I am still just irrationally enthralled by this game, though over the last week I have not played quite so much because I am starting to get back into MMOs once more. This week has been all about Iron Banner, because I am trying my best to get my Hunter to Rank 5… in spite of not being here for the weekend due to travel plans. The major goal of the month was to hit 335 light and I have managed to do just that on the Titan, however I am still lagging on the Warlock and Hunter with the primary slot that they need the worst being literally any legendary quality artifact. I need to sort out what I can do to get one of those because I have plenty of infusion fodder to feed into an artifact… they just have 320 blues currently equipped. The only real frustration that I have with Destiny right now is that Bungie is apparently shit at math. We were told that several activities would drop an item equal to your current light level of better. However now sitting at 335, there are still a truly silly number of activities that drop 334 items. From Challenge of Elders turn-ins last night I got both a 334 weapon and 334 arms, and from an exotic engram I got a 334 secondary… all while showing up in game as 335 light. This is pretty maddening since 334 is useful for infusion if you are desperate but what you want to see is 335s so you can bring up ALL of your gear to that light level. Regardless I am still loving the game and I am hoping that the next big patch will address this problem. Also hoping that when I get back from my trip I can finish the push to Rank 5 because I am roughly halfway to Rank 4 at the moment.

Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

This marks the second week of me being “back” at least as far as doing the Tuesday night raid content is involved. I am still very much in “catch up” mode, but I am enjoying myself. As far as downtime activities I have started the grind to get elemental crystals for the first Anima weapon, aka the Relic 2.0 or 3.0 depending upon how you are counting. I am loving being Lala-Bel once more and I guess whatever funk I was going through that was keeping me from playing MMOs has passed because I am enjoying myself again. I very much need to be doing a nightly Expert but that has yet to happen quite yet. After yesterdays post however I found a whole slew of people willing to be tagged and pulled in for expert running. Now I just need to get back from this weekend and get started on this proper. Also apologies ahead of time for the nightmares that will be induced by the creepy-assed Calcabrina dolls.

Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls

Season Six is very much winding down to a close, and I have managed to accomplish pretty much everything that I could have hoped for… at the very least I got my additional stash tab. I have friends who still have things to knock out to get theirs so I am very much in a help as needed mode. That said I am still poking my head into the game on a regular basis to farm for Menagerist Goblins…. something I have yet to actually see. The highlight of the season was something that I did not even realize was a thing until it dropped. I guess the cosmic wings are among the rarest item this time around.. because it is RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG. You have to get one of the rainbow goblins to show up… and then have to get it to drop the Whimsydale portal… and then have to get a specific mob to show up in there to get them. In any case pretty much any time I get a Whimsydale portal I holler at anyone who happens to be on to come along with me now just in case they drop again. I’ve made it way further this season than at any other time… the only thing I am not looking forward to is trying to merge my current seasonal bank into my non-seasonal bank once more.

Overwatch

This is the newest addition to the list and also the one I have spent the least time playing. This week was the official launch of Overwatch, and my friends list has been completely on fire about this game. I played it enough in beta to know that I liked it, and then ceased to play it any further waiting for launch. Now that launch is here however… I have all of these competing priorities. The game is really good and so far I have yet to find a champion that I don’t like… pending I give them a serious chance. I was largely diametrically opposed to D.Va largely because the mech looked like a killer whale mixed with a guardian mode veritech. However after getting the carbon fiber skin from a loot box… and giving her a proper try I found out that I really enjoyed it. The game is probably the best designed shooter I have played in a very long time. The thing that is going to keep me from really sinking my teeth in however… is it has no PVE/Exploration gameplay like Destiny. If I could have Destiny set in this universe with character progression and collecting awesome weapons… I would be completely hooked. This will likely always be a game relegated to the “once or twice a week” column for me largely because I am just not that competitive. Earning loot boxes is a cool reason to keep playing, but eventually there will come a point where I run out of things I care about that came come from lootboxes.

World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor

This is the backburneryist of backburner games for me right now. I’ve gotten in the habit of logging in daily and collecting my free money from the garrison… especially now that I put a massive dent in my finances and bought the Grand Expedition Yak. That said every now and then I do play one of the characters that I am still in the process of leveling. I have this grand idea that it would be fun to roll into Legion with a full list of level 100 characters, however I somehow doubt that is going to happen… much the way as it has never actually happened during any of the other expansions. However that said the alt of choice right now is my druid that I am slowly pushing up. In truth I am in a holding pattern until Legion and largely not paying a ton of attention to the game in the meantime.

Things Removed From List

Elder Scrolls Online

The truth is the MMO Funk hit and I never really returned to playing this regularly. I still very much want to, but it is going to need another lag in some other game for me to really sink my teeth into it. The game that exists today is amazing and they have done a really good job of keeping the content fresh. The biggest problem is I really don’t have anyone to play with over there on the North American server cluster. Now if I were playing on the EU side… I know lots of active and happy guilds. I would absolutely play with the Whitestar folks were that really a viable option.

Warframe

While initially interesting to me, this game just did not sink its teeth into me the way it did the rest of the AggroChat crew. There is just something that I don’t like about it… and I have tried to reason out what exactly it was. I still have an account and still have some cool stuff on it, so I might at a future date return to it, but it never really replaced my love for Destiny.

The Division

While technically it was never actually on the sidebar… it probably should have been. I was all about The Division at launch and that excitement did not even manage to carry me through to the level cap. I am sitting around level 26 and I am just not sure what is holding me back. Largely the content at that level doesn’t feel nearly as interesting or rewarding as it did at lower levels. The packs of mobs out in the world seem to be scaled for group play, and when you down folks… they don’t seem to be dropping anything interesting. In theory I could hold my nose and grind through it… but what would I be grinding for? I am so far behind the curve in gear and it doesn’t feel like the game really gives you a lot of great options to catch up. There has been a sequence of changes that I really didn’t feel like had me in mind. At first I liked that it felt like you could progress through the game on many different vectors and end up at the same loot goal. However the crafting material nerf really hurt that feel for me. This is something I might return to later, once they offer some Destiny like catch up mechanisms to give players a hand up.

Endless Rockets

May 10, 2016 by Belghast

Action Movies

This so far has been one of the stranger breaks from work I have experienced. Yesterday I was a complete waste of space in all possible versions of that term. I think I was just overly drained from the weekend and spent most of the day starting things but not quite getting into them. I played some Rift, patched up Final Fantasy XIV but never actually logged in, played an awful lot of Diablo 3 in very short spurts and occasionally connected to Destiny over remote play to attempt to get exotics from the Ultra Knight on the Dreadnought. For much of the day though I aimlessly drifted along with whatever happened to be on television. Namely for whatever reason yesterday was apparently classic action movie day or something, because I caught all of Die Hard and Rambo: First Blood Part II, as well as bits and pieces of others. The funny thing about action movies is with time they usually seem worse than you remember them… this was absolutely the case with Rambo. There were so many things in that movie that just seemed silly, from the fact that the helicopter he was piloting at one point seemed to have an endless supply of rockets, to the fact that he fired a ton of bullets and never seemed to stop and change the magazine… nor did it actually seem to have any place in his outfit to store extra magazines.

Diehard on the other hand, for the most part holds up just as well as I remember it. In fact in many ways, I appreciate the movie more these days. The only part I ever really had trouble reconciling was how he ended up without shoes. I mean I get the point… he was taking the advice to de-stress, but before I went off to be a hero I would have put my shoes on rapidly. Also the concept of undressing in a strange bathroom is not really something I would ever be comfortable with. However once the movie starts proper that movie makes a strange amount of sense. It comes off as more a heist film than a traditional action movie, and we are getting to watch both the heist and the guerrilla resistance to it. The movie has so many tropes that play out to make it work… from the cokehead hotshot, to the incompetent police chief… to the equally incompetent federal agents. I am sorry but Bruce Willis is still a bad ass even when I see him in a modern movie, but he seems to have lost a lot of his early “moonlighting” charm that gets displayed in the original Die Hard. Sure he makes snarky comments, but I feel like Die Hard really was more a reprisal of the Addison character in a different setting. The other big takeaway from watching both movies back to back is just how many visuals have been stolen from these films.

Crusaders are Slow

Last night was also a mixed bag in that we had been warned for the last several days that a major weather event was coming. Most certainly it was because it absolutely wreaked havoc on Wynnewood area, but for the most part in the Tulsa area we got nothing but spotty rain. That did not stop us however from going into storm mode where we both hung out downstairs watching the constant scroll of weather reports and storm chasers across our screen. As a result I didn’t do the normal Destiny thing because it didn’t really feel safe to be upstairs and oblivious to what was happening. Instead I played quite a bit more Diablo 3, and eventually took to helping my friend Thalen level. Later we were joined by Grace and the pace of leveling increased greatly. As my crusader I can take a lot of damage, but I just dish it out ever so slowly. The unfortunately part about my seasonal journey is that I am now to the point where I need to do some sort of a conquest to move on to the next step, and none of them look really doable for a crusader. I mean the “easiest” and most grindy one is to level three gems to 65, and at this point I am working on that every so slowly. I have all three of my normal gems to over 45 and am ever so slowly working my way to 65.

However to get that bank tab I am going to need another conquest somewhere. We made a quick attempt at the kill 350 in a cursed chest and came up very short with our group getting 292 which normally would feel awesome… but still very short of the goal. I have a couple of friends playing Demon Hunters and in theory they can solo it, so I might pester them for assistance. The chest in question that supposedly is the easiest to do is one that spawns in the Paths of the Drowned in Act V, and spawns a ton of bogglings. The problem being for me to kill things as a crusader I need to get them super close to me… and trying to wrangle all of the mobs is the big challenge. I really either need an disintegration wizard or a rapid fire demon hunter that can wreck things as fast as they spawn to get through it. The only problem here is that I am definitely behind the curve when it comes to this season and both demon hunters already have their extra bank tab and are now playing significantly less. My fear is that this is going to be the equivalent of the Black Spindle in Destiny… aka that thing I try a bunch of times but can never seem to do. As far as today goes… I am not sure what is on the radar. I know I need to adult like mad, and do the laundry. I am also hoping to sneak off to go see Civil War, largely because I know some of my co-workers will be wanting to talk about it upon my return. As far as gaming goes, that is entirely up in the air and more than likely I will just end up playing a lot more Diablo 3.