Diablo Franchise Archives - Page 45 of 55

Crusaders and Guardians

May 1, 2016 by Belghast

Season Six

While I greatly enjoy the concept of the Developer Appreciation Week… I am always somewhat happen when it is over. During the week I feel like I have to be making posts along that them, so when things happen that I want to talk about… I end up pushing them down until the week is ultimately over. Now as I sit here for the first unfettered post in awhile… I am finding it super hard getting started. The biggest happening of this weekend is that Friday evening at 7pm my time the newest Diablo 3 season began. For season six I opted to roll a Female Crusader, because I had so much fun playing as one last season. I have this general goal of getting a male and female of each class eventually, but that also means that someday I will have to finish playing that mage and attempt to play a witch doctor. The only problem I am running into is that it feels like what made the crusader so amazing last go round… was the fact that the Invoker set was just phenomenal. Now that I have my six piece Akkhan set, it doesn’t feel anywhere near as powerful as I did last season. In fact while the set dungeon was a breeze for me last go around, this one is only causing chain wipes. Granted I am not nearly as geared as I was at this point last year, in part because I am not getting drug by Carthuun.

When the season started we ended up with six people on the guild discord, and as a result we split into two three player teams. Ultimately ending up with me and Grace playing together, with Solaria and Kodra joining up for short periods of time. Towards the end of the evening Kylana was with us as well as the other three player team ultimately disolved with Ashgar got pulled away for work, and Callalil went to bed. I myself only lasted through level 60, because that was ultimately the point at which I was starting to fall asleep at the keyboard. So I went to bed around 11pm and the rest of the group pushed onward. Yesterday morning Grace and I ended up playing together, and she helped me get the rest of the way to 70, and unlock my gear set. She was sitting over 100 paragon levels, which means that more than likely Carth is sitting around 300ish. At some point I will join in his Torment X shenanigans because I really need some gear. All in all it was a great start of the new season, and at some point I will sort out my spec and with gear should be able to solo more stuff. Right now the challenge is finding thorns on gear, and I have ended up burning through all of my materials trying to enchant away useless stats and turn them into thorns.

Banana Split

Another awesome happening this weekend is that yesterday while waiting on folks to show up for the AggroChat game of the month show, I managed to push my Hunter to rank 5. This is the first month that I managed to get to characters to rank 5, and I’ve since started working on getting the warlock there as well. My hope is that after I finish knocking out this blog post I will head upstairs and work on that. Iron Banner has been really damned good to me, letting me amass a lot of gear and weapons that will ultimately either get used as is or serve as infusion fodder. In theory I should probably be doing matches on my Titan with the hopes of getting more 335 items, but it feels good actually working on my other characters. After playing the hunter I can absolutely see why they do so damned well in the crucible. Throwing knives are amazing, and I had so much fun yesterday finishing off people with them. I still feel like golden gun however is the least exciting of the supers, but I am getting used to using it to optimal efficiency. There was one point where I managed to get three kills in a row with it and earned the way of the gun trophy.

Over the course of the week I have picked up so much gear, with the latest acquisition being a 335 Tormod’s Bellows. The only challenge here is that I am not sure if I will keep it or infuse it into one of my heavy weapons. I could really use a 335 sword… just saying. The funny thing is… I got the 335 drop on my absolute lowest level character while working on the Warlock yesterday. So I am wondering if maybe the buff in faction that you get for pushing up additional characters does something as well to the chances of getting max light drops as well? In any case another Iron Banner has come and almost gone, and I have loved every minute of it. I finally sorted out why I like PVP in Destiny and never have in other games. There is something about getting real loot at the end of matches, as opposed to a currency in lieu of loot that can maybe someday add up to be enough to get something interesting. I love random chance, and I love being rewarded with interesting stuff. More so than that… I love getting not quite perfect items… and then trying to figure out how to use them to my advantage.

The Secret Stash

April 10, 2016 by Belghast

Comfort Gaming

One of the things I always have trouble sorting out, is what game I plan on playing during the AggroChat podcast. Now there are casts that have a strict no gaming rule while talking, but I honestly think that would damage some of the discussion. Essentially we are hitting record on conversations that naturally happened already on our voice chat server. Part of that equation is the fact that we are talking while gaming, and for the last couple of weeks the game of choice has been Diablo 3. I think partially it is that I know the season is coming to an end, and as a result it is fresh in my mind again. The ultimate irony however is that I am not playing seasonal characters at all. While recording two shows ago I ended up pushing my non-seasonal monk to 70 and last night I started working on trying to get my non-seasonal warrior from 60 to 70. That would leave only my Wizard as being sub max level, which honestly…. I am considering giving another chance. I am not a huge fan of finger wigglers… but after running with a lot of wizards over these last couple of seasons… I have to say I see the charm. They can simply melt anything that they come up against, and there actually is a semi melee range option that I would probably be able to stomach.

The other thing that I tried my hand at this week was Path of Exile. I find it shocking that the game has been out this long and I have yet to even really give it a shot. The talent screen honestly scared me off a bit because it looked as complicated as the final fantasy x sphere grid. However for some time my friend Carthuun has been talking it up, pretty much anytime we brought up Diablo 3. It is entertaining and I feel like I could play it happily, but I have to say I was somewhat shocked how relatively difficult that it starts. I mean it is not super hard, but you can’t simply mow through the mobs in quite the manner that you do in Diablo 3. All this really means is it makes me realize just how watered down the latest Diablo installment really was. The only disappointment was that there didn’t seem to be any sort of a real “knight” light character with a sword and shield in the manner of the Crusader in D3. I ended up choosing the big brute character, and at some point I will probably try and go sword and shield. I am not sure exactly how I am building the character yet because I have yet to get terribly far.

Pre-Patch Farming

The majority of yesterdays game time was spent running around in The Division and attempting to farm crafting components. At the current moment I have a decent stash of materials, or at least am in a better position than I was before I knew the crafting changes were coming down. I am not super pumped about the patch, because it feels like it is taking the game in a less player friendly direction. However that said I am still slowly making progress towards the level cap. While running around yesterday I managed to ding 24, and encountered some areas that I had not seen yet. The strangest of course was this marijuana farm that was nestled deep inside a building. As the day goes on today my goal is to continue trying to level because I would really love to be able to participate in some of the big activities, but I am absolutely certain I will not hit the cap before the patch. I am somewhat frustrated that it sounds like gearing is going to be harder for me, than it was for the folks who rushed the leveling process. That however always seems to be the case… the first few you get to cap get easy epics, and those who level slowly have to struggle through the throttled drop rates.

Tamriel Revisted

February 6, 2016 by Belghast

Point Click

Yesterday I kept being reminded by co-workers of just how horrible I sounded, so after I finished with my critical meetings I took off and headed home around 12:30. After eating a hastily grabbed lunch of convenience store pizza… I collapsed on the sofa trying to force fluids while finding something comforting to watch. I guess my version of comforting is a little different than most people, because I wound up watching the entire first season run of Rick and Morty. Granted I have watched a lot of this show, but it turns out there were a handful of episodes that I missed when they originally aired. Whatever this thing is that I caught down south, it is very much kicking my ass. Blogging has been a real struggle because it is very difficult to string thoughts together into enough of a cohesive mass to make into a blog post. It is my will along that I am committing fingers to keyboard and producing words… because I simply do not want the streak to stop. I am a couple of months away from my official three year anniversary on the whole daily blogging thing, and the seventh anniversary of my blog. So until I hit that at the very least, I will keep up doing the daily thing even if I have to struggle to make words happen.

Lately my crutch while sick has been Diablo 3, but I feel like I am running out of things I care to do right now. I’ve gotten the seasonal rewards, but more than anything I am farming content in the hopes of getting the last few items I need to drop for the build I am working towards. Clearing regular rifts and doing bounties is the sort of mindless interaction that works well when I am sick, but I am quickly reaching the point where I am questioning why I am bothering? The other side mission has been to gear my monk, but once I found out from several folks that you only get one set of gear per season…. a lot of my gusto was lost. I thought I would be able to go kill the bosses I needed to get my first set of gear, on my second character and be up and running and clearing content pretty quickly. Alas that is very much not the case, and my best option is to ride along with Rae who is regularly clearing TX stuff… but honestly after being able to participate, going back to just having to pray to stay alive… makes it pretty uninteresting. Yesterday my big problem was the fact that I had a very needy game install going on in the background, that kept slowing down my teleportation to the point that the battle.net would disconnect me before actually ending up in zone with Rae.

Worst Install

On a whim yesterday afternoon around 1 pm, I started installing The Elder Scrolls Online. I guess I had forgotten just how painful the install process was, because it took until roughly 8 pm for it to finally complete. During the last hour of that time I was pretty much unable to play anything else on my laptop. The thing is… I have installed much larger games in far less time…. so I have to fault the launcher for just how painfully slow it was going. I mean I say this as someone who was installing to a laptop that is using a AC Wireless card capable of 650 MB connection on a total internet connection that generally runs around 150 MB down. I should have been able to completely saturate my pipe and had this game down in short order… but it took quite literally 7 hours to finally get installed. Now for a good chunk of that time I was still playing Diablo 3 so that could have been slowing things down… but the total download was tortuously slow. The last hour or so it was thrashing my hard drive badly enough that I really could not do anything else functional on the machine, so I wound up mostly fiddling around on my phone while watching television. The problem with ESO was that I honestly can’t remember why we stopped playing, other than the fact that one by one we just stopped until I was one of the last four or so people still active. For me I guess the Veteran game system was so bloody boring because it felt like I was no longer making reasonable process. I made it roughly two zones into the Aldmeri campaign, when finally my desire to keep playing petered out.

I guess recently I had been curious about what was going on in game, and they have done a few high profile DLC releases. So around 8:30 last night I finally was able to log in and poke around. Firstly I have to say I guess playing this game for roughly two years in testing… means that I have some serious muscle memory going on. While I had to reset all of my talent points, I can still for the most part remember exactly how I played it. All of the little things like dodging, and blocking attacks… came back without any effort and before long I was up and running and questing again. I feel like maybe this is the speed of game that I need right now. What I am struggling the most with in my current state is interacting with other human beings. I have been pretty much oblivious to twitter and slack since coming back from Pax South, and as a result I am kinda cocooning in my own little world again. Much like SWTOR…. ESO was a great single player game… and as a result I found myself really enjoying questing around last night. That is of course until the nyquil kicked in and I simply couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer. I figure I will put in some more time today playing and maybe talk a bit about my experiences on AggroChat tonight. That is of course if I have any voice left. Right now my voice is pretty damned squeaky so I am thinking we might have to rely on someone else to do the bulk of the talking this evening.

Pax Pox

February 3, 2016 by Belghast

The Convention Crud

So this weekend obviously was Pax South, and I am not sure how you could read my blog and not know this… but whatever. It went pretty well overall, but on the drive home Sunday my throat kept getting more and more sore. At first I was thinking that maybe I was getting closer to Oklahoma, and as a result my allergies were just going haywire. The entire time I was in the San Antonio area, I honestly did not have much issue with my allergies. It was just like they magically went away, so in theory driving back home… could feel like I was coming down with something. However yesterday I heard from Damai that he too is in the sore throat phase, so I am guessing we quite literally did walk away with whatever crap happened to be going around down south. PAX is this universal incubator for illness, and last year I somehow escaped catching whatever Ashgar and Rae ended up bringing home. This year however I was not quite so lucky, and in spite of using the hand sanitizer every single time I passed one… I still caught something.

I’ve been in hibernation pretty much the last two days. Originally I had requested off both Monday and Tuesday to recover, but had not planned on actually taking Tuesday. However it seems like I apparently was clairvoyant in knowing that I would need that extra day. This morning… I still feel like crap, but my fever broke sometime between going to bed Monday night and getting up Tuesday morning. My lungs are getting consistently clearer, and my throat while feeling sore still is getting consistently less sore as time goes on. While it felt flu-like at first, I am guessing it is just a run of the mill virus or cold, because I seem to be getting over it pretty quickly. The irony is… that I completely resisted catching whatever my wife had prior to the convention… but I am guessing that probably taxed my immune system to the point of catching something while there. In any case I think I am more or less on the mend, but going out and grabbing some groceries last night left me completely exhausted, so I can only imagine what state I might be in tonight when I finally get home.

Lady Monk

The great irony of a gaming convention is the fact that during those few days… I end up playing far fewer games than I usually do. The other strange side effect has been, that now that I am back at home…. I am not quite sure what to play. As a result I have been poking my head into Diablo 3, even though I have seemed to lack much purpose. Monday night I spent a good chunk of it running around with Grace and completing various stuff like greater rifts. Then when she logged to go take care of something, I ended up starting a brand new character. I realize that I could have probably gotten one of my friends to boost it to 70 within a few minutes… but instead I have been leveling a monk through doing bounties. The funny thing about this is that with all of my paragon levels, Master is the new Normal. I could probably ratchet up my difficulty some more, but I like how fast everything seems to be going right now. I’ve needed to run bounties for a bit, and doing so on a fresh character feels like I am gaining more than doing it on my crusader.

The truth is, I’ve never managed to get a monk to 70. My original non-seasonal one is 68 and I realize that I could very easily push it over the line. The problem being that I just haven’t had any desire to play non-seasonal characters. I have been in this mindset that “seasonal” are the “real” characters… and that the normal characters are almost like playing on some test server somewhere. I realize that it is backwards from the truth, but I have shifted to this point of view as looking at the season as the only thing that really matters. As a result I just can’t seem to bring myself to play any characters that aren’t in the current season, which I guess works out nicely since that seems to be what most people are playing. The only thing that worries me is how I am going to function when I need to merge this season into my existing already overloaded bank. At some point I need to spend some time eating some legendaries and unlocking abilities, because half of the junk that is clogging my non-seasonal vault is never actually going to get used. In any case as of last night I hit level 43 , and I plan on working it up some more tonight. I should be able to hit 70 in no time as I am gaining at least one level per bounty step on average.